How TikTok Changes Music Industry: Analyzing Music Trends and Copyright Infringements
In part I, I said my intended audience is the general public, music labels, and TikTo users. However, I realized later that this is too broad for the intended audience. In part II, I think my intended audience are TikTok users are younger generations because they are the people that cares about TikTok. However, the in-class discussion between several peers changed my mind when they said that the focus of my project is mainly geared towards the music labels because it is more about analyzing trends.
As I continue to refine my project, I am determined that the intended audience for this project contains music creaters and distributors (music companies, record labels, musicians, individual artists) because the first part of my project is analyzing trends for music features that are popular on the music platforms and how TikTok is a game-changer for the music industry. Another part of my intended audience is all TikTok users because the second part of my project is now talking about the platform’s copyright policy and it is important that everyone using TikTok can be aware of this.
During my presentation, I expect my audiences to first realize (probably astonishing) that TikTok is becoming more and more popular and is changing the music industry when they see the data visualizations of monthly active users and the increase of representation of TikTok songs on Billboard chart. Next, when the topic shifts to copyright infringements, I expect everyone to be more serious and start to think if they have seen any videos that contains a song that has been changed and remixed that could perhaps become an infringement. Therefore, they will connect better with the call-to-action in the end.
In part I, when I was asked to find a topic for final project, I wanted to find a topic that relates to my interest and where I wanted to work in the future. I choose to do a project about TikTok’s influence to the music industry because it is begining to change people’s way of consume music and more artists will produce songs from the trends on TikTok. Therefore, I found TikTok datasets and considered comparing them with Billboard and Spotify’s datasets to see if this trend is actually shown by the data.
In part II, I created my story wireframe and asked three intended audience for a short interview on my project. The feedbacks I got from them allows me to further develop my project. They told me to think more about my call to action and how to connect with my story better as my last version jumped from analyzing the trends to a copyright call-to-action. I created it that way because I wanted to give a more specific call-to-action instead of raising awareness to protect the creative space. Therefore, I decided to dig more into copyright issues by finding more statistics about how many videos have violated the copyright rules. It turns out that I am able to find data on the number of videos removed by the platform, and a portion of the videos goes to integrity and authenticity, which is linked to copyright infringement. From there, I decided to give two call-to-actions: one for music labels and one for TikTok users. Companies and individual artists can analyze trends to make their songs more feasible on TikTok but keep in mind of diversity, and TikTok users can protect the creative environment by following the rules of the platform on copyright and report copyright infrigements.
Over the developing process, the scope of my project has changed from increasing diversity of the music on TikTok (the original idea in Part I, but realized that I couldn’t find datasets to show the diversity changes that TikTok brought to the industry) to analyzing the trends of song features and adding a copyright part to my project. In this project, I learned to develop my stories by digging in on datasets and think about different data visualizations that can support my storylines.
In the process of creating my data visualizations, I spend a lot of time cleaning up te datasets and matching them because many of them are only the data from one year and I wanted to look at the trends over several years.
I think the most successful data visualization is the pie chart about TikTok’s increase in representation on Billboard Chart. I think the contrast between the two years is shown intuitively through the graph. In part II, some labels on the chart is a little small, making it harder to read, therefore I adjusted the label size on the graphs and made sure the audience from the classroom can see everything. I also changed the title of my graph so it tells about more information than just “TikTok Songs on Billboard Hot 100” from the feedback I got from the grader.
Other changes on my visualization designs from part II include the feedback I got from the interviews of adjusting the y-axis of the line graphs so that the trends and be more clear to the audiences. However, I still want my y-axis to start from 0 because I am afraid that changing the range of y-axis might mislead the audiences. Therefore, to make the trends more clear to the audience I decided to increase the length of the y-axis to make the graphs more into a portrait view. I also got the feedback that the timeframe of 1958 to 2021 and the changes on Billboard does not really have anything to do with TikTok, therefore, I created a mark of when TikTok launches at 2017 to connect the trends more.