Lawrence the Band the Dogpile
The Double-Edged Sword of Going Viral on TikTok.
Hello and welcome to the 8 new subscribers since my last post, How SNL Got Their Most Viewed TikTok Ever. If you find today’s piece interesting, feel free to forward it along as a cautionary tale to someone in your life who is trying to go viral.
In recent weeks, my TikTok FYP has been abuzz with a polarized debate around a snippet of Lawrence the band's new song, “Whatcha Want”:
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Quick Stats (at time of writing):
17.6M Views, 1.1M Likes, 16.2K Comments, 58.1K Shares, 152.3K Saves
Like PCT: 6.3% | Comment PCT: 0.09% | Share PCT: 0.3% | Save PCT: 0.9%
Video Length: 35 seconds
Date Posted: August 2nd, 2024
I assume most of your eyes tend to glaze over when reading those numbers, but I wanted to highlight the absurdly high Comment PCT of 0.09%.
Typically, the highest Comment PCT we see on videos I analyze is 0.02%.
So even though 0.09% reads like a small figure, this is nearly five times the amount of the other videos we’ve taken a look at – both here, and on my monthly, “Why These Comedians Went Viral” column over at Cramer Comedy Newsletter.
In other words, Lawrence really struck a chord with this video— just not in the way they might have expected.
While initial comments from their followers back in August (when the video was originally posted) praised the vocal performance and energy, the tide turned dramatically over the past few weeks.
Everyone from faceless accounts with 0 posts or followers:
to the internet’s busiest music critic, Anthony Fantano, has been dunking on it:
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Said Fantano, “more and more, people’s exposure to [soul, funk, R&B] is being defined less by the artist who forged these paths, and more by advertisements. So now, stuff we’re producing organically just sounds like commercial garbage”.
While some of Lawrence’s fans have rushed to defend them, it isn’t exactly helping their cause.
For instance, below are some of the comments on this video of Broadway actor and musical comedian Jared Goldsmith weighing in:
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Lawrence are an easy target.
They are white, have millennial, “theater kid” energy, and are “nepo-babies”1.
Perceived authenticity is the most highly valued asset on TikTok, even by people whose accounts are private, and whose profile pictures are of emojis and celebrities.
Combine all that, and you have the perfect recipe for unfiltered cyberbullying2.
And of course, there’s the backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.
TikTok user @lilbadsnacks, a touring artist in her own right, makes the point that members of Lawrence testified to Congress against the LiveNation/Ticketmaster merger. Her take: regardless of how you feel about their music, if as many people cared about Lawrence’s advocacy for artists as much as they enjoy hating “Whatcha Want”, maybe musicians could actually make a rightful profit while touring, and it wouldn’t cost $300 to sit in the nosebleeds when your favorite artist comes to town:
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But now, with Lawrence’s music being dismissed as Target muzak, some users are questioning whether they’ve become too closely aligned with the very structures they critique. And the more attentive viewer may notice the embedded Ticketmaster widget in the lower left-hand corner of this separate clip from “Whatcha Want”:
But here’s the part that makes no sense to me.
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