In many ways, TikTok has been a great thing for music, as it has given some artists levels of exposure they likely would have never received if their songs hadn’t gained popularity on the video platform. There’s another side of it, though, that Tate McRae is not a fan of at all: writing songs specifically with the hope that short sections of them will go viral on TikTok.
In a recent interview on CBC’s Q With Tom Power, McRae explained her position, saying:
“If I’m being super honest, I feel like whenever someone walks into a room, like a songwriter, and they’re like, ‘We need to make something that’s going to catch on TikTok,’ it, like, fully kills it for me. I’m just like, I think that is the death of art, if we are basing a song off a 15-second clip. I just don’t think that’s real music. I’m not listing to a 15-second clip to feel music the way that I want to feel music.
So that’s why I will never, ever, ever start something basing it off one section. I will always write from how a song makes me feel in the room, the full song, start to finish. I don’t care if there’s not a 15-second… if it doesn’t feel like a full song to me, it’s worthless to me.”
Tate McRae says she’s not interested in trying to reverse engineer a viral TikTok sound:
“I think that’s the death of art if we’re basing something off a 15 second clip.” pic.twitter.com/zqDqRxflvE
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) December 12, 2023
Check out the full interview above.