In the fifteen years since “Friday” by Rebecca Black went viral on YouTube, the music industry — and virality itself — has changed dramatically. The internet mainstream that once pushed the music video for “Friday” into ubiquity for the then-13-year-old singer has given way to a much more fragmented landscape of short-form video. Music discovery is no longer predicated on the gatekeepers still hanging on when “Friday” dropped in 2011, it’s controlled by the unknowable algorithm, whether that is on Spotify or TikTok.
“My experience with virality,” Black tells Billboard. “My first experience, at least, was something that I don’t know if it really exists anymore… Back in the day… what was happening on the internet was everywhere.” Still, the artists today who win the virality lottery on TikTok may have more in common with Black’s launch in the music industry than most of the other artists surfacing back then, which were still often a byproduct of the industry machine and traditional marketing methods.
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Now, every artist is potentially one post away from being discovered, and that fact has reshaped how talent — and the labels that support them — operate. But, as Black experienced herself, while virality is often the artists’ goal, it does not always happen the way one intends it to. Some artists go viral too early to capitalize on their luck, and some land their song into the cruelest corners of the internet. But ultimately, is virality still a good thing?
On the latest episode of Billboard’s music business podcast, Billboard On the Record, Black joins the show to talk about the evolution of song virality, the new RIAA Platinum certification for “Friday,” and what her goals are with her upcoming album Age of the Exhibitionist, out Friday, Sept. 4.
Watch Black’s episode of Billboard On the Record below on YouTube, or click here for more viewing and listening options. An edited and condensed excerpt of the conversation can also be found below.
I was thinking about the idea of how they say there’s no such thing as bad press. I’m wondering: Do you think there is such a thing as bad virality?
Rebecca Black: I feel like everyone would have a different opinion on it. My experience with virality — my first experience, at least — was something that I don’t know if it really exists anymore. With how much the internet has changed over the last 15 years, I just don’t know, right?
I think unless somebody gave me that exact experience again today — in this culture where there are not just so many more social media platforms, but the vastness of each of them has grown exponentially — I felt like we still had a little bit stronger of a monoculture going on in 2011. But at the same time, there were all of these untapped pieces of the internet that were much more secluded, like 4chan and those types of things.
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Virality and its experience can feel very bad because, especially in an age where our algorithms have gotten stronger and more sharply molded to who we are, your experience of the internet is so hyperpersonal to you and what you’re looking for. Back in the day, in my experience when I was a kid, what was happening on the internet was happening everywhere.
“Friday” is now certified Platinum by the RIAA, which is a huge deal for any song. Have milestones like this changed your perception of the song now that you’re 15 years out?
I guess so. The milestone of “Friday” hitting platinum is obviously a huge deal. I do feel a sense of, “Wow,” over something like that happening, even though it took 15 years.
However, it would hold a different kind of weight if it were a song that I wrote and felt connected to in the way I feel connected to my new music. I’ll always leave room for more milestones in the future. But what has changed the feeling of that song for me is the in-person reactions I get to experience around it. Every time I go on tour, I play “Friday” or acknowledge it in some way, and the reaction is fiercely positive. Over the years, that has inspired me to find new ways to connect to that song.
You’ve always been an independent artist. Why did you want to be independent?
Most of the time, because it was the only choice.
The industry has changed. I’ve watched it change a million times over the last 15 years. I’ve been in conversations where it felt like maybe it was time for me to do the label thing at very different points in my career, including one pretty recently.
The reality is, over the last six years, I’ve felt like I really started to find my way in this industry and build a career that connected with me and other people. The success of it has been due to it being an extremely small team of people. And, without me having to explain myself, they understand what I want to do and they let me do it.
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It was the first time in my life I had a manager who was like, “You want to make the EP, or you want to make an album? OK, go. Here are some ideas of people to work with or new connections, but you don’t have to use any of them. Whatever you come back with, we’ll work with.” That freedom was what really allowed me to build something for other people to grab onto — something that hopefully felt actually unique and allowed people to see some version of myself.
I’ve never been signed to a label, so I don’t have that experience, but… it feels like, in order for that to work, you either have to have people in that world who understand you as much as the people closest to you do and allow you to make creative decisions, or you have to get to a level of success where there is no risk that a label has to take.
Success to labels is extreme [success]. It’s commercial. The benefits they reap from artists require a very high level of success. I’ve never felt like I came to a place where all those things felt like no-brainer decisions.
Artists have not been able to choose independence as their path for very long. When you first went viral, that was just right around the time being indie was becoming a viable option for an artist with ambition. Before that, there were so many gatekeepers that would have blocked your path to fame. I find that so interesting.
Definitely… No longer are we being told what to listen to. No longer are we turning on the radio to find something to listen to. You find something in a deep corner of the internet, and then you hope that one day you fight hard enough for the radio to play it. It feels like such a different experience.
We’ve seen many different kinds of artists either find intuition that way or struggle to adapt. Labels still have a place they serve within the industry. There are very obvious corners of the industry that they still carry. Radio, for sure, [is one because it] is expensive.
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I feel very encouraged that the artists connecting with audiences nowadays are ones that have something to say. Those artists can be anyone and anything. They can have as many years of history as somebody like me and continue to redefine themselves on their own terms.
I feel so excited about so many artists who are coming up right now, and seeing pop as a whole be redefined as something that has real substance. When I got started, even the fact that I wanted to continue and become a pop artist after “Friday” was like, “Why do you want to do that? How are you supposed to add credibility to yourself if you’re just going to be a pop star?” Now we see so many artists carving a lane in pop that really means something.
You have an album coming out, Age of the Exhibitionist, on Sept. 4. What does success look like for you now, given that you’ve already experienced a moment of truly ubiquitous virality? Do you still hope for virality, or do you even hope against it?
Any time that I — or anybody else in my life — has ever tried to beat the hands of the internet and guess where something is going to land, we’ve been wrong, on both the positive and negative side. If I spent any time in my life trying to recapture or capture, in any way, what happened to me, I would be wasting a lot of my own energy.
I only hope to create experiences that feel like something is happening for the first time for me, because that’s what makes me feel young and excited.
Have you spoken with artists who had virality during the TikTok age about what their experience has been? How does that compare to yours on YouTube 15 years ago?
I’ve definitely spoken to a lot of artists, writers and producers. Whenever something like TikTok comes into play, and the short-form-ification of music and music enjoyment comes in, I think it impacts everybody.
The consensus I’ve heard, and feel myself, is that with virality in any capacity, as soon as you try to gamify it for yourself, it immediately loses all of the special qualities that make something a candidate to be viral in the first place.
When you look at a lot of songs that have gone viral over the last few years, they’re really not built for it — at least the ones I think will prove themselves timeless. Everything that should work from a math perspective doesn’t, and everything that shouldn’t work does. That’s the only lesson I think everyone is taking away from it.
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There was a period in the early TikTok days when everyone started to adopt the app that the cycle of viral hits that came and went felt incredibly fast. I feel for artists who went through that experience: They had a song blow up overnight, maybe took a label deal, and by this point, most of those label deals are over, and often the audience has moved on. A few have told me they don’t know what to do next. Do you have any advice for them?
I definitely resonate with that feeling. When something becomes bigger than you, it can feel like you lose your grasp over it. If you are the person who created something that held that special, undeniable quality — or whether it was purely accidental — the catalyst from the beginning was you. All your work needs to be is getting back to creating, if it feels right.
You can also have a viral moment and never make music again. But I think a lot of new artists maybe don’t have [enough] history [to inform their] perspective. That’s something I feel grateful to have: I have 15 years under my [belt] of literally just this — of being considered valuable and invaluable, valuable and invaluable, over and over again. I can’t be as phased as I once was. That’s kind of a blessing.
All you can do as an artist is, if you want to create, you better keep creating. The worst thing you can do is get in your own way. Any artist we’re seeing have momentum, where something is working for them, the reason it is working is because of the artist. Nobody is making it happen for these artists anymore.
There’s no real written rule. The industry is only ever trying to keep something organic happening on the internet. Anyone who’s telling you that you have to make 15 TikToks a day to be successful, or that you have to be outputting such a high level of musical content for us to care about you — it’s at odds with the music industry. You have organic creation next to a huge, commodified business, and those things just don’t work. Yet it is this thing that connects everybody and will continue to exist whether we like it or not.
As an artist, upholding as much of your own independence as you can — whether that’s emotionally or financially — is the best thing you can do for yourself.