Photo Credit: Rogue Artists / CC by 3.0

TikTok celebrates the launch of Charli XCX’s new album with an exclusive in-app fan experience, signaling a shift away from streaming platforms.

Charli XCX’s highly anticipated new album, Music, Fashion, Film, is getting the TikTok treatment with an exclusive in-app fan experience to celebrate the launch. The campaign follows a similar affair for Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, and signals that the biggest album launches are no longer kicking off on streaming platforms such as Spotify.

The TikTok event gives the community and Charli’s fans a slew of new ways to discover exclusive content, celebrate her new music, and join fellow fans taking part in challenges inspired by the new album. The artist has built a passionate global community of over 5.6 million followers on TikTok; the new campaign follows the extraordinary success of 2024’s Brat Summer, when her Brat album became a cultural moment on the platform.

TikTok’s Music, Fashion, Film fan experience includes a search hub, exclusive content from Charli herself, an unlockable profile frame, and in-app tasks to celebrate the album release. TikTok will also support the campaign with a major global marketing push both on and off-platform, including prominent in-app promotion, a social media campaign, and a billboard activation in Times Square.

“One of my favorite things about making music is seeing how fans take it somewhere I never expected,” said Charli. “Watching people create with my songs and share their own ideas around the music is always inspiring. I’m excited for everyone to enjoy Music, Fashion, Film on TikTok and can’t wait to see what fans create.”

Such album marketing rollouts are fast becoming the norm, with an increasing number of artists and their labels incorporating interactive experiences into digital album promotions. TikTok launched a similar in-app experience for Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, and YouTube provided multiple interactive features for Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl release last year.

Notably, all of these events are taking place on social media rather than streaming platforms—which makes Spotify’s push to become a one-stop-shop for fans seem like more than just an effort to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Streaming has indeed become the dominant way to consume music, but it’s not where listeners engage with fandom.

Honestly, that dichotomy makes sense. For many fans, especially millennials and older, streaming platforms are a place to collect and organize one’s music—not engage with it as a shared experience. Social media has long been the place to go to engage in fandom spaces, and young listeners are the most tapped into that reality.

So should streaming platforms try to become social platforms to engage with fans? Not necessarily. Many longtime Spotify users, for example, have left the service for other, more music-focused platforms as Spotify dials up its podcast and audiobook content. At the end of the day, it’s about having options, and those who want to engage with music as an audiophile are by and large turning to services like Apple Music, Qobuz, and TIDAL.