In honor of Satisfaction Month, MTV Information got down to highlight the LGBTQ+ artists creating the up to date anthems that soundtrack queer areas and report on the brand new frontiers in at the moment’s streaming panorama serving to them to take action. As we did final 12 months, we have additionally got down to profile rising LGBTQ+ artists and have fun established ones making waves. Welcome to Queer Music Week.
By Max Freedman
As soon as upon a time, the Oakland ukulele-pop musician Mxmtoon thought TikTok was an app for, as she tells MTV Information, “8-year-olds who play Fortnite.” That modified when her 2019 single “Promenade Gown” went viral on the now-ubiquitous social media platform. There, the music has racked up 447,600 streams to this point, and Mxmtoon’s TikTok channel has 2.8 million followers and 131.9 million likes. Now, the 21-year-old artist is certainly one of many LGBTQ+ musicians utilizing the app to make their music and full selves heard whereas connecting extra intently with their audiences, particularly their LGBTQ+ followers.
In conversations with MTV Information, Mxmtoon (who additionally goes by Maia however retains her final title out of the general public for her privateness) and different LGBTQ+ musicians say they’ve used TikTok to get their music to queer listeners extra rapidly and instantly than many conventional promotional routes like radio airplay. The web communities they’ve constructed by way of the app have translated to sold-out reside exhibits and main label offers, although some have used their TikTok presences to take care of a degree of artistic autonomy unprecedented for newly signed artists. Even because the app has admitted to shadowbanning phrases equivalent to “homosexual,” “lesbian,” and “transgender,” in addition to usually pro-LGBTQ+ content material, TikTok has nonetheless turn out to be an area of connection and authenticity for LGBTQ+ musicians and listeners alike.
It’s simple to think about TikTok as a COVID-era phenomenon. Certainly, throughout early lockdown, you fell down a dance-challenge TikTok rabbit gap or watched approach too many clips that use the identical music. But as Mxmtoon recollects, TikTok was already an enormous deal pre-pandemic. She says that earlier than she launched “Promenade Gown” in Could 2019, she and her workforce “went into that marketing campaign and that launch with the intention of constructing a whole lot of content material on TikTok so…folks may work together with it for some time earlier than we [released] the precise full-length music.” On the time, TikTok had roughly 271 million month-to-month energetic customers, a mere fraction of the 1 billion month-to-month energetic customers it reached in September.
All through our dialog, Mxmtoon speaks about TikTok each with an executive-sharp advertising eye — she says “have interaction” and “consuming content material” no less than as soon as — and continued incredulity about how uniquely the platform can assist musicians. “There was a very massive second [for] ‘Promenade Gown’ on TikTok earlier than we even filmed the music video,” she says. “It was actually attention-grabbing to see how massively it took off.”
As her viewers has grown, Mxmtoon has discovered an area to extra totally be herself. “TikTok has performed an enormous half in me expressing my id as a queer individual,” she says. The near-instantaneous conversations the platform facilitates by way of its video replies to feedback make it “very simple to have a dialog about your id. It’s totally simple for me to make a video about being bisexual and attain an viewers of folks that additionally perceive that have and need to eat content material consultant of their identities.” She repeatedly responds to feedback asking about her sexuality. “If I am open and sincere about my queerness,” she says, “it permits different folks to be open and sincere about theirs, as properly.”
TikTok is how the British folk-pop musician Cat Burns — who has 1.2 million TikTok followers alongside roughly 539,000 TikTok streams on the 4 variations of her folk-pop music “Go” — discovered her sexuality. Since TikTok “creates an algorithm for you,” the 22-year-old tells MTV Information, “it knew that I used to be not definitive in who I assumed I used to be and would present me explicit movies and…would then frequently present me those self same movies, after which I might repeatedly like them, after which it bought me pondering, ‘Oh, am I not straight?’”
Now, she’s writing music made explicitly for fellow LGBTQ+ folks and Black ladies — and reaching listeners by way of social media. “I would like folks to really feel heard and represented within the music that I make,” she says. “I need to make folks really feel seen.” She pulled off each when she launched her music “Free” in 2021, a couple of 12 months after she first gained a big TikTok following throughout early lockdown by repeatedly doing singing challenges and masking songs. “Free,” which she launched after signing to a serious label, “instantly hit the goal group that it wanted to hit, and it touched the folks that it wanted to the touch. I do not assume I might be capable of hit the [number] of folks that I’ve hit with out TikTok.”
By the platform, each Burns and Mxmtoon have constructed an viewers of LGBTQ+ listeners and used the platform to share their tales with followers. Or, extra precisely, additional share their tales. If music is storytelling, then on TikTok, LGBTQ+ musicians are revealing their narratives to new folks and constructing even deeper connections with longtime listeners.
The Missouri-raised glam-pop musician Jake Wesley Rogers — whom some have known as “Gen Z’s Elton John” — says that the connections TikTok builds have resulted in an unprecedented switch of energy from labels to musicians. Though the 25-year-old singer-songwriter printed 5 music movies in 2021, he tells MTV Information, “This 12 months, my budgets bought minimize for music movies, and the reason was, ‘You are making TikToks at no cost, they usually’re doing far more to construct your viewers than these very costly music movies.’ Which is truthful!”
Rogers says that musicians “do not really want the infrastructure, the cash, and the push behind a label to get on the market. For those who get a following, you get a following, and you’ve got energy. You personal every little thing.” In a major-label ecosystem the place musicians — including LGBTQ+ songwriter Justin Tranter, who heads Rogers’s label, Facet — nonetheless converse of an total missing queer presence within the business, the ability that TikTok can provide marginalized musicians to take and preserve management of their tales when formally coming into the business is nothing in need of game-changing.
For Rogers, this energy has primarily come in useful after, not earlier than, signing to a label. Aspect had already provided him a deal earlier than he joined TikTok proper because the pandemic started. His following on the platform has since grown to only underneath 300,000, with just a few million-plus-views movies on his web page, plus the “Abraham Lincoln was a queer icon” video that first took him viral in Could 2020. He hasn’t wanted a TikTok megahit like Burns’s “Go” or Mxmtoon’s “Promenade Gown” to construct a loyal following on and past the app.
“TikTok was this solution to share my music and discover new folks that, perhaps historically, you’d get from touring,” he says. However as soon as touring restarted, he “noticed it translate instantly. I performed my first headline exhibits final 12 months, and I feel the rationale they bought out was due to TikTok.” His listeners, he affirms, are “coming to the exhibits and believing in what I imagine in.”
These beliefs embrace that “authenticity, love, and consciousness are a part of us…and the world is absolutely fucked up and there is a lot magnificence in it.” Additionally: “We comprise multitudes, and I feel…TikTok rewards that. It rewards a holistic individual. … I am an artist first, however I am a whole lot of issues, and I can present all these issues.” Rogers says that the multiplicity and contradictions that TikTok encourages are why the platform is house to a thriving neighborhood of LGBTQ+ musicians and listeners. “I feel queerness is that,” he says. “Queerness is current in that blurry state of nonconformity.”
Because of TikTok, main labels are much less hesitant than ever to embrace and uplift their artists’ creativity and identities, and LGBTQ+ musicians and listeners are discovering one another extra simply than ever. The app is permitting LGBTQ+ musicians to instantly put forth their full selves to like-minded audiences. There, artists’ personalities are on show alongside their music, and no conventional music advertising method can so deftly pull off that feat. “It was a lot enjoyable for me…to specific sides of [myself] on the platform different than simply my songs,” Mxmtoon says of her early days on the platform. Since then, she says, TikTok has “been this useful gizmo to not solely promote my music and share my songs, but additionally promote who I’m.”
After all, TikTok comes with its challenges for musicians, even past the potential for censorship. The app has enforced bans in a number of languages on sure LGBTQ+-related phrases. It has additionally shadowbanned queer TikTok content material in international locations with no latest historical past of anti-LGBTQ+ laws. For now, these bans haven’t affected LGBTQ+ artists all that considerably, although Mxmtoon notes that TikTok’s “historical past of not essentially advocating for all folks and shutting down sure voices and tales” means “they nonetheless have a methods to go.”
Mxmtoon additionally mentions that TikTok has made music “laborious to consider from my enterprise mind — how do I make a snippet of my music take off on TikTok? And from the artistic facet of it, I am like, ‘I do not need [snippets] to outline why I make this music and the best way that I write.’” Burns says that efficiently utilizing TikTok to unfold your music requires maintaining with developments, which provides one other job to a listing stacked with writing, recording, touring, doing interviews, and simply dwelling your life. “So long as you progress with the instances of TikTok, it undoubtedly works in your favor,” she says, “however if you happen to stick doing the identical content material, it by no means [goes anywhere].”
Rogers factors to a different problem with utilizing TikTok to advertise his music. “If I get too caught up in likes and feedback and virality, then I will cease making music by chance,” he says. However he provides that TikTok continues to be value it: “The individuals who have discovered [me] and proceed to search out [me] are investing, extra than simply following me.” They’re displaying as much as his exhibits, which implies they’re truly funding his music profession. And for Mxmtoon, a continued TikTok presence eliminates the longstanding “divide between artist and viewers.” The platform excels at constructing real bonds between LGBTQ+ musicians and the individuals who would naturally be most thinking about their music: LGBTQ+ listeners. Burns says that she’s “seen so many individuals” of all sexualities “enjoying [‘Go’] and utilizing it of their movies.” In any case, she provides, “That is simply what music does. It connects folks.”
