After going through hell in India, and nearly being banned in one state, TikTok surely is going gung-ho in winning back India that was already besotted with the platform in the first place.
ByteDance pressed on the gas with a huge media campaign and offered Rs.1 lakh to 3 winners every day for 15 days!
They even had ads (and billboards) in Tamil, for the state that banned them temporarily! The Tamil ad. definitely looks like it hasn’t been read/seen by a Tamilian, given the mauled formatting and language used 🙂
Yesterday, that they have collaborated with singer Aastha Gill of DJ Waley Babu fame to launch an anthem for the upcoming ICC Cricket World Cup. The song, called ‘Jeetega Saara India’, claimed TikTok, is “exclusively available on TikTok”. Aastha clearly mentions, “So, when I decided to work on a World Cup song exclusively for TikTok, I wanted to bring alive the same spirit for the rest of us. I knew it had to be to the tune of Saara India now called Jeetega Saara India”.
The original song was released as a full song, by Sony India, as ‘Saara India’ on May 6th on every conceivable streaming platform, and has raked in more than 17 million views on YouTube already. The new song has different lyrics from the original, with the same tune.
But what is specifically interesting is that TikTok is not a music platform, even though ByteDance is planning to launch a music streaming service in India. TikTok is a short video sharing platform that allows users to create short music videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds.
When I checked TikTok, I found both versions – the original and the new one as 15-second audio files that users can play and upload their own videos while that music is playing. And the original is already very popular on the platform with 100K+ videos!
The other interesting insight here is how people consume music. The same people who are active on TikTok also have access to YouTube. But if a song becomes exclusively available on TikTok, the audience could know, remember and sing/dance to just a 15-second clip of the song. That’s almost the Twitter equivalent of text – when blogs and long posts were cut down to size by Twitter earlier, now a song, conventionally assumed to be 2+ to 5 minutes in length is being TikTok’d to size, into 15 seconds!
For context, there are 2 versions of this ‘anthem’ available (exclusively) on TikTok. The first one, 15-seconds long, goes,
Jeetega Saara India History Dhauraani Hai
Jeetega Saara India Trophy Ghar Laani Hai
(followed by incomprehensible gibberish)
The 2nd one (another 15-seconder) goes,
Jaddu ki fielding Kohli ka balla
Shami ki bowling Machega halla
Padega chauke pe chakka
Jeetega Saara India Puri Tayyari Hai
Jeetega Saara India History Dohrani Hai
Even if she had created a full song, the way users on TikTok consume the actual song is in 15-second snippets!