"TikTok directed my music to who it needed to go to," Zahm said. "That song helped me heal and it resonated. That's the most fulfilling part of being a musician."

Yet she admits she's limiting her time there. "Vulnerability isn't something I can do all the time," Zahm said. "I have to take breaks because I'm still growing a lot as a person, and those rushes of want for connection will come, but I never want to force it based on views or likes."

Singer Zoë Hoetzel, who performs as Zolita, built a sizable following (500,000 followers) for her pithy quips on queer culture, alongside operatic videos for singles like "Bloodstream" and "Bedspell." She's grateful for TikTok's ability to let her music videos reach "queer 14-year-olds in Kansas, that's so exciting to me," she said.

"But it is weird to be like 'I wrote this powerful, vulnerable thing, and now I have to package it and perform emotion by sitting in my car and crying so that people will see me and listen,'" Zolita admitted. "It's really interesting what you've got to do to get people to pay attention there. It's hard to keep your sanity when it's such a numbers game, and to be at the mercy of this platform when you're promoting art."

So what would happen if no one is at TikTok's mercy anymore?

A government ban, or a dug-in conflict between the app, labels and publishing companies, would upend assumptions about how to grow an audience.

Such a day may be coming sooner than many expected. "My reaction to this briefing is that TikTok is a gun aimed at Americans' heads," Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told reporters after a classified Senate briefing on TikTok. "The Chinese communists are weaponizing information, but they are constantly, surreptitiously collecting from 170 million Americans and potentially aiming that information, using it through algorithms, at the core of American democracy."

Shou Zi Chew, ByteDance's CEO, said in recent congressional testimony that "I understand that there are concerns stemming from the inaccurate belief that TikTok's corporate structure makes it beholden to the Chinese government or that it shares information about U.S. users with the Chinese government. This is emphatically untrue...Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country."

For musicians and industry insiders, whose careers now depend on TikTok, they aren't sure who to root for.

"Artists want their music on TikTok," Strauss said. "It's good promotion, and it sucks for those that aren't there anymore. But artists should also be getting paid, and yet I'm not sure it would change that many things for artists themselves. I'm not saying TikTok is fundamentally good, but the only people suffering here are the artists."

Zahm agrees. "It's kind of heartbreaking, I'm friends with people that have worked really hard to write songs, and given that TikTok kind of runs the music industry, it sucks to tell them they're not allowed to be on it," she said. "I expected there to be a new thing someday, I just didn't expect this limbo."

Whatever TikTok's ultimate intentions are for music, it is an effective means for artists to reach new fans, and there aren't many others left.

Labels are trying to catch up — Warner Music Group recently announced its interest in buying Believe Music, the French parent firm of services like TuneCore that distribute independent and emerging artists (though the company later passed). "TikTok is one of the few things that does seem to touch real people," Zitron said. "But this is a problem for all creative media now. Where do you go to discover new music? The value of a song has been reduced to nothing, and the people controlling the mechanisms are disconnected from the actual creativity."

Columbia Records' Flanagan said that a course correction was overdue.

"Artists should have unlearned having one platform being their main vehicle," Flanagan said. "I knew people with massive Instagram audiences, and suddenly they change their algorithm and you can't reach your followers. You have to make sure you have email, texting, Discord, Substack, all of that. Trends change so quickly, you need to be able to transfer your superfans to other platforms."

"Is TikTok still useful? Of course. But it does make you wonder if it's waned, or if they just have too much going on right now," Lee said. "You can't be completely dependent on one platform to break artists. We have to think of a world where the platform is the artist and fans will follow you."

For someone like Hemlocke Springs, who used TikTok to succeed beyond her wildest dreams, she said she "feels for emerging artists, especially ones under UMG right now," she said. "The music biz's focus is on TikTok, and pulling that away from people sucks. But to solely rely on viral moments to push things off, that feels counterintuitive too."

For her, the new killer app is a very old one — playing great live shows.

"I feel like touring is going to be an even bigger thing," she said. "I'm going into these Doja shows assuming no one knows me, and the more I lean on that, the more it lights a fire under me."

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