Musicians Are Sick And Tired Of Their Labels Allegedly Gatekeeping Their Releases Unless They "Go Viral" On TikTok

"Basically, I have a song that I love that I want to release ASAP, but my record label won't let me," the singer captioned the video. As their unreleased song played in the background, they continued: "I've been in this industry for eight years and I've sold over 165 million records and my record company is saying I can't release it unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok."

To sum it all up, she said: "Everything is marketing. And they do this to basically every artist these days. I just wanna release music, man. And I deserve better tbh. I'm tired."

Florence Welch — of Florence + The Machine fame, of course — captioned her TikTok "The label are begging me for 'low fi tik toks' so here you go. pls send help ☠️ X" before starting her video with a mournful sigh.

Recently, on the podcast Las Culturistas, Betty Who — who's an independent artist — shared her gripes with the music industry. "There's not a single record label in this town that will sign me. They all turned me down," she said. "This is where it's shifting, is [labels] go, 'We wanna sign people with a viral hit on TikTok only.'"

"I'm not going to wake up and all of a sudden be really good at TikTok," she said. "So me, being an old person on an app trying to force it, will not make it any better."

Maggie Rogers got a good buzz goin' and lamented her label's demands in the bathroom of a New York City bar. She's also been promoting her new album on her TikTok, which she's obviously being forced to do!

The singer-songwriter made his mandatory TikTok debut by parodying his hit "I Don't Wanna Be" and changing the lyrics to express his ✨disdain✨ for the platform.

FKA twigs has since deleted this TikTok, but you get the idea.

Apparently, Omar Apollo's label makes him make two TikToks a DAY!!!

Charli paired this sweet visual with the audio clip, "Well, I didn't really wanna be here, so I was made to be here, so obviously I'm just, like, wanting to get this over with and get on with my life. It's a big inconvenience for me."

To this comment saying this TikTok was planned, Halsey was quick to comment back: "Bruh I wish it was haha. They just said I have to post tiktoks they didn't specifically say 'about what' so here I am."