In summer 2023 the most searched song on Shazam is a song from 2015, Makeba, by French singer Jain, which is also played over 125 million times on Spotify. The motif is the fragment “Ooohe, Makeba, Makeba ma qué bella / Can I get a oohe? / Makeba makes my body dance for you”, which has become a meme reproduced billions of times in short videos, especially ballets, on TikTok. In 2019, Old Town Rd by Lil Nas
The term “meme” indicates a sort of cultural virus: the origin is in genetics, a content that replicates and modifies itself through social exchanges, as Dawkins explained in 1976 in The Selfish Gene. Already Umberto Eco in 1984, in his Six walks in the narrative woods and speaking of the films that became cult, he underlined the dimension of ramshackleness, the unlikely union of different elements, and the consequent ramshackleness, or the fact that the same media object could be dismantled and reassembled in such a way as to allow any game of interaction possible by the user. Today meme is an umbrella word for any type of content that spreads exponentially: its popularity has also sparked a lively debate that has moved further and further away from the genetic origins of the term, criticizing for example the casual nature inherent in the reference to virality. Henry Jenkins talks about spreadable averagei.e. contents designed to be disseminated, not randomly but involving users as an active part of the process.
The music industry and the artist have an ambivalent attitude towards the application of these dynamics: on the one hand the song is thought of as spreadable average, to be circulated as much as possible, but on the other hand there is the fear of losing control of the rights, and therefore of not being able to monetize the circulation. The case of Harlem Shake by Baauer is exemplary: between 2012 and 2013 it became one of the first musical memes, the subject of reworkings and challenges (challenge) on YouTube and Reddit; the artist nevertheless tried to obtain forms of monetary recognition from the works of other users, despite the song itself being an assembly of previous materials.
The success of TikTok has made this diffusion mechanism simultaneously simpler and more complex: the songs are originally designed to be dismantled, disassembled and reassembled and transformed into memes. The social media provides the user with various tools that allow them to manipulate the song, altering the tempo (le sped-up songs, the songs sped up), removing or adding vocal parts. In essence, the songs are remixed by the user-creator to adapt them to the videos, potentially until the version and the original artist-songwriter-performer disappear. The question that record companies ask themselves is no longer “which single should be sent to the radio or TV”, but “what is the cut?”, that is, what is the audio fragment of the song to upload to TikTok, the phrase or the melody that is thought to be more suitable for viralization, to become a ballet or a challenge; often it is the artist himself who publishes an accelerated version of his music, in the hope that it is his original fragment that goes viral, and not the version created by a user.
There is an element of continuity between single songs for classic media and meme songs for social media: the need for industry and artists to carry out a conversion, that is, to move listening towards a space in which it can generate a direct economic return for industry and artist. Once upon a time, the goal was for an appearance on the radio or TV to lead to the purchase of the single or album, now that virality on social media is transformed into ratings on the platforms. This is not a simple process: if the videos with a fragment of Makeba on TikTok they have been viewed tens of billions of times, the streams on the platforms number in the hundreds of millions. Always Makeba finally shows another change: songs become memes from below, starting from the users, regardless of the industry's promotion strategies. Social media relaunch songs released years before, unknown to the new generations: the role of the discography is to manage the phenomenon, through software that monitors the progress of its catalog on social networks, understanding in real time if a song is suddenly inserted into a greater number of “creations” and is about to go viral.
The transformation of songs into memes is nothing other than the manifestation, with new tools, of a historical and organic process of pop music: a medium that functions as a showcase for the launch of the song and the artist. With the not negligible difference that what was once a passive spectator is today a user who has the technological means to take the place of the artist.
From The song industry by Gianni Sibilla (Laterza Publishers).
