How is Drake coping with life in lockdown? Fighting boredom by dropping dance moves, if the video for his new single, Toosie Slide, is anything to go by.
Beyond showing the rapper taking isolation seriously, donning a face mask and gloves while staying home like so many of us (admittedly from his astronomically large Toronto pad) it also introduces the track’s namesake dance routine.
“It goes right foot up, left foot slide / Left foot up, right foot slide,” he sings, while demonstrating the moves in his lobby.
Seemingly harmless fun – but for Maddy Raven of digital music marketing agency Burstimo, it doubles as a “fantastic” social media marketing ploy.
Drake’s simple, easily-copied choreography is perfect for the new wave of video-based social media platforms, in particular Tik Tok.
The Chinese-owned social media app, in which users create 15-second clips, usually set to music, was second only to WhatsApp in global downloads last year.
With a billion users of its international version, it’s increasingly established itself as a way for unknown artists to score a breakout hit – from Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, to Doja Cat’s Say So and Arizona Zervas’s Roxanne – in the same way that featuring in a television advert could supercharge an artist’s sales in the pre-internet era.
“TikTok’s an entirely new way of engaging, not only with your direct fanbase but anyone who wants to dance or show their creativity in short-form video,” says Sammy Andrews, CEO of Deviate Digital, an advisory agency to the entertainment industry.
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Drake himself alluded to this in December’s single, War, chastising rappers who “spend too much time on [Instagram] captions, not enough time on action.”
Shortly after he took his own advice, messaging internet-famous dancer Toosie a beat with some lyrics, and asking for help creating a routine. Four months on, the song has topped Billboard charts.
‘Don’t you want to dance with me?’
The star is no stranger to viral dance recognition. His awkward moves in the video for 2015’s Hotline Bling spawned endless memes, while the track In My Feelings inadvertently sparked the ‘Kiki challenge’ of summer 2018. The Toosie slide, however, is noticeably more transparent about its ambitions.
Raven believes this is a dance partnership of self-interest, capitalizing on Drake’s dance pop-culture heritage, and making new music directly to his young fanbase.
The majority of TikTok’s users are aged between 16-24, firmly Gen Z – an audience with fragmented consumption habits, who rank Drake as one of their generation’s most influential musicians.
Dance is also central to the platform’s success – with routines like The Get Down, Renegade and Cannibal all going viral since parent company ByteDance absorbed lip-syncing app Musical.ly, (plus its huge database), in 2017.
Add to this TikTok’s unique layout, which prioritises content discovery over subscriber clout, using an algorithm that learns from viewing preferences and therefore rewards retention rather than simply pushing popular content – and it’s a stage that even a megastar like Drake, now 33, can’t ignore.
“This is a new frontier for music discovery and music interaction,” says Andrews. “Unlike many other apps people are actively seeking music to engage with, in ways that most have not on other platforms”.
Toosie Slide is a “perfect example” of writing specifically for the platform says Raven. “Its straightforward lyrics provide clear instructions for a potential dance trend, even if it isn’t publicly stated”.
And it’s a tactic that appears to be paying off. Two days after the video’s release, views of Tik Tok entries submitted under the #toosieslide hashtag had already hit 20 million. A fortnight later, the tag has been viewed 2.4 billion times (including three attempts by Justin Bieber). That’s a lot of eyes and ears by anyone’s standards.
“Make no mistake every record label in the world is now actively looking for ways to utilise TikTok as part of a marketing campaign for a track,” says Andrews.
Snowball effect
The hungry marketing push is part of a broader picture, as TikTok traction can often be a springboard for further success on mainstream music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
Just last month The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights started trending on TikTok and is “now chart-topping and one of his most streamed songs,” explains Raven, helping him reach 64 million monthly listeners on Spotify for the first time in his career.
One of the most famous examples of TikTok’s potential snowball effect is Nas X’s Old Town Road. Prior to becoming a global country-crossover smash with Billy Rae Cyrus, the rapper’s original version broke out on TikTok, with creators playing it in their videos as they transformed themselves into cowboys and cowgirls.
Its continued success saw Nas X go from a college dropout sleeping on his sister’s floor to instigating a major-label bidding war, ultimately signing to Columbia Records.
“I should maybe be paying TikTok,” Nas X told Time magazine last year. “They really boosted the song.
Source:Â bbc.com