In honor of Delight Month, MTV Information got down to highlight the LGBTQ+ artists creating the modern anthems that soundtrack queer areas and report on the brand new frontiers in at present’s streaming panorama serving to them to take action. As we did final yr, we have additionally got down to profile rising LGBTQ+ artists and rejoice 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 so far, and Mxmtoon’s TikTok channel has 2.8 million followers and 131.9 million likes. Now, the 21-year-old artist is one in all many LGBTQ+ musicians utilizing the app to make their music and full selves heard whereas connecting extra carefully with their audiences, particularly their LGBTQ+ followers.
In conversations with MTV Information, Mxmtoon (who additionally goes by Maia however retains her final identify 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 net 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 stage of inventive autonomy unprecedented for newly signed artists. Even because the app has admitted to shadowbanning phrases reminiscent of “homosexual,” “lesbian,” and “transgender,” in addition to typically pro-LGBTQ+ content material, TikTok has nonetheless change into an area of connection and authenticity for LGBTQ+ musicians and listeners alike.
It’s simple to consider TikTok as a COVID-era phenomenon. Certainly, throughout early lockdown, you fell down a dance-challenge TikTok rabbit gap or watched means 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 crew “went into that marketing campaign and that launch with the intention of constructing a number of content material on TikTok so…folks might 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 lively customers, a mere fraction of the 1 billion month-to-month lively 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 may help musicians. “There was a extremely massive second [for] ‘Promenade Gown’ on TikTok earlier than we even filmed the music video,” she says. “It was actually fascinating to see how massively it took off.”
As her viewers has grown, Mxmtoon has discovered an area to extra absolutely be herself. “TikTok has performed an enormous half in me expressing my identification 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 identification. It’s extremely simple for me to make a video about being bisexual and attain an viewers of folks that additionally perceive that have and wish to devour content material consultant of their identities.” She commonly 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 nicely.”
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 believed I used to be and would present me explicit movies and…would then regularly present me those self same movies, after which I might constantly like them, after which it acquired me considering, ‘Oh, am I not straight?’”
Now, she’s writing music made explicitly for fellow LGBTQ+ folks and Black girls — and reaching listeners by way of social media. “I need folks to really feel heard and represented within the music that I make,” she says. “I wish to make folks really feel seen.” She pulled off each when she launched her music “Free” in 2021, a couple of yr after she first gained a big TikTok following throughout early lockdown by commonly doing singing challenges and overlaying songs. “Free,” which she launched after signing to a significant 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 suppose I might be capable to hit the [number] of folks that I’ve hit with out TikTok.”
Via 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 referred to 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 revealed 5 music movies in 2021, he tells MTV Information, “This yr, my budgets acquired reduce for music movies, and the reason was, ‘You are making TikToks without cost, and so they’re doing rather more to construct your viewers than these very costly music movies.’ Which is truthful!”
Rogers says that musicians “do not actually need 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 general missing queer presence within the trade, the facility that TikTok may give marginalized musicians to take and keep management of their tales when formally getting into the trade is nothing wanting 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 beneath 300,000, with a couple of 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 technique to share my music and discover new folks that, possibly historically, you’ll get from touring,” he says. However as soon as touring restarted, he “noticed it translate instantly. I performed my first headline exhibits final yr, and I feel the rationale they offered out was due to TikTok.” His listeners, he affirms, are “coming to the exhibits and believing in what I consider in.”
These beliefs embody 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 include multitudes, and I feel…TikTok rewards that. It rewards a holistic individual. … I am an artist first, however I am a number of issues, and I can present all these issues.” Rogers says that the multiplicity and contradictions that TikTok encourages are why the platform is residence to a thriving group of LGBTQ+ musicians and listeners. “I feel queerness is that,” he says. “Queerness is present in that blurry state of nonconformity.”
Due to 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 strategy 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.”
In fact, 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 current 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 “arduous to consider from my enterprise mind — how do I make a snippet of my music take off on TikTok? And from the inventive aspect 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 process to an inventory stacked with writing, recording, touring, doing interviews, and simply dwelling your life. “So long as you progress with the occasions of TikTok, it positively works in your favor,” she says, “however for those who 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 am going to 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 exhibiting as much as his exhibits, which suggests 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 fascinated with 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.”
