TikTok, the new ramp to success

At this point, we’re all probably familiar with stories of viral hits — Lil Nas X’s Old Time Road being a prime example. However, when songs become as popular as Old Time Road, it becomes tough to track their journey to international success. The wealth of data available simply becomes overwhelming. 

Sure, we can keep track of the major milestones of the Old Time Road rise to power — breaking on TikTok, getting to the top of Billboard Hot Country charts just to get removed from the list (and start a media scandal along the way), etc. However, when the song gets as big, it’s hard to grasp the entire timeline — success markers are way too plentiful to compile a cohesive story. 

Since Old Time Road turned the tables of the industry, there were quite a few other artists that tried to follow in Lil Nas X’s footsteps. First, Ambjaay with Uno, and Blanco Brown with “The Git Up” tried to (quite literally) fit Lil Nas’s cowboy shoes. Then “Lalala” by Y2K & bbno$, became the second biggest success story to date. The rap duo’s carefully engineered viral marketing campaign stretched far beyond TikTok and, in a matter of months, took them to 20 million Spotify monthly listeners. 

All those “Old Time Road” follow-up tracks had one thing in common. All of them purposely targeted TikTok as their primary “break-out” platform. Uno and The Git Up tapped into the “dance challenge” aspect, spawning somewhat successful “signature dance routines” for fans to try and recreate. Lalala, on the other hand, leveraged the platform’s meme culture, providing TikTok users a meme template with its first lines of the track. TikTok has become the fuel of many music marketing strategies, so we have decided to create our own Artist guide to TikTok.

“Gordon Ramsey” by HL Wave (Feat. Jhonny Flames)

In this article, we’ve decided to track the growing success of the latest addition to that list of TikTok-powered viral hits and break down the journey of “Gordon Ramsey” by HL Wave. Quite like the examples we’ve leased above, Gordon Ramsey, released late august 2019, first surfaced on TikTok thanks to the “Clock Woah” dance challenge. On September 13th, TikTok user @derekklawrence uploaded the first Clock Woah video:

⏰ 😯 on TikTok

here’s a new woah, i call it the “clock woah” blow it up pls #fyp #dance #woah

That TikTok video ended up getting over 500k likes and 70k shares, starting a new challenge for TikTok users to recreate the “Clock” dance move over HL Wave’s spitting rhymes, referencing celebrity-chef. By September 17th, the trend already spawned several “multi-million view” follow-ups — and by September 20th, Soundcharts recorded the first Spotify Viral-50 entry for Gordon Ramsey — 33rd line on Norwegian chart. 

Canada was the second market to adopt the trend, with the track entering the local Viral-50 charts on September 22nd. Australia and Denmark followed suit, and by September 25th, the song broke into the US Viral-50, landing on the first position in the chart. The track stayed in top-5 up to this day (as of October 18th, “Gordon Ramsey is in the 3rd place on the chart). The next significant milestone came on October 2nd, as the track has entered the Global Spotify Viral Charts at the third place, to stay up in the top-5 up to October 15th (currently on the 13th position in the chart). 

However, the track’s power is not limited to its virality with the TikTok audience. The transition to more conventional promotion channels is already apparent. The independent curators were first to acknowledge the tracks virality, as some Spotify influencers started adding the track to the playlists throughout the second week of October. The most notable additions we’ve spotted so far are the Diplo’s Mad Decent Weekly (50K+ followers, added on October 5th) and Rap Nation (135K+ followers, added on October 8th).

Furthermore, the track is now making its first move outside of the digital space. Over the weekend of October 11-13, “Gordon Ramsey” got its first play on the radio — and not just anywhere. The two stations were Australian Triple J and German 1Live, which are definitely in the shortlist of most influential radio stations in their respective markets. Then, on October 16th, the celebrity-chef himself shared a clip of him doing the Clock Woah challenge on Instagram, scoring over 2 million views and a LOT of press for HL Wave. 

So, here we are. HL Wave is now entering the most crucial stage in any “TikTok success story”, the tipping point of graduation from the platform. Despite its 500 million monthly active users, the core TikTok audience is still a niche, and the content on the platform burns really fast. So, while TikTok virality can give an artist a lot of momentum, you have to make a transition to other platforms and mediums to make it count.

So, let’s review the entire timeline of “Gordon Ramsey” so far:

Here’s a journey of a viral hit in 2019. It all starts with a teenager on the internet coming up with a hand motion. Then: from a TikTok challenge to streaming charts, from streaming charts to 3rd-party playlists, mainstream radio airplay, and onto celebrity Instagram — all in a matter of a single month. 

With the information in hand, it’s hard to establish which parts of the journey happened “organically” — and which were planted by the artists’ team. In any case, it’s still not clear if the song’s success will have any long-lasting effect on the HL Wave’s career.

While the rapper’s Spotify followers’ evolution is showing a similar growth pattern, it just crossed the 1k subscribers mark. HL Wave is still nowhere near the healthy career metrics — right now, the ratio between monthly listeners and followers on his Spotify profile is 500:1. So, what we’ve seen today is not a success story but an opportunity that can turn into one.

The music industry moves fast those days — I mean, really fast. It has always been that way. Music marketing is about leveraging the moment “while it’s still hot” but in today’s digital environment, that window is getting tighter and tighter. Surely, TikTok has created a new promotion space like nothing the music industry have seen before. While some music professionals still refuse to take it seriously, there's no denying that the meme-driven platforms has created a new way for artist to bypass the conventional gatekeepers. However, while TikTok likes might drive Spotify streams, but they don’t bring people out to shows. To make something meaningful out of a viral success, you need to look at it as a means towards an end — not an end-goal itself.

Gordon Ramsey is now slowly going down the Spotify Viral charts. Will the Texas-based rap duo be able to leverage the song's viral success and follow in the footsteps of Lil Nas X and Y2K & bbno$ — or will turn into another "dead meme" a couple of months down the road? That remains to be seen.