‘Add To Music App’

This article investigates TikTok as a site of music discovery in the context of the app’s recent attempts to reassert its role in relation to music streaming platforms. Based on a survey of over 150 TikTok users and six interviews, we examine the competing platform affordances of music discovery and passive content consumption, and how TikTok’s interface attempts to manage user attention and experience. Platform affordances are understood as unfixed, relational sites of contestation between users and platforms, defined by the specific needs and motivations of both. It is argued that the increased role of recommendation algorithms in online music discovery has the potential to disrupt platform users’ ability to articulate identity and build social connections via musical practice. This is complicated by TikTok’s unprecedented ability to approximate these functions via its For You Page and its success with framing musical experiences as embodied and socially embedded, something music streaming platforms have struggled to do. Despite this, TikTok’s failure to account for some elements of users’ music discovery practice has resulted in continued tensions between two key affordances: music discovery and passive entertainment. Data suggest that the user reception of new TikTok features designed to assist and choreograph music discovery is mixed, including awareness among users of the encroachment of platformization and datafication on music discovery and digital music culture.