Dancing to the #Challenge: The Effect of TikTok on Closing the Artist Gender Gap in the Music Industry

This study investigates how "Hashtag Dance Challenges" (HDCs), a phenomenon popularized on the short-video platform TikTok, are instrumental in helping music artists achieve traction in the marketplace for digital music. HDCs represent an appealing combination of music and dance, designed to engage users and achieve virality, thereby benefiting artists whose music is featured. This research focuses on how HDCs contribute to the success of women artists, as compared to men, in an industry known for its diversity but challenged by gender inclusivity. We apply role congruity theory to posit that women artists are in a better position to derive benefits from being featured on HDCs, relative to men artists, particularly in cases of gender concordance - when both creator and artist are both women. We measure the benefits of HDCs using daily changes in in the artist’s followership on Spotify, a leading music streaming service, and test our hypotheses using song and artist-level data collected from Spotify and TikTok. We find that artists featured in a new HDC achieve a significant increase in followership on Spotify, relative to similar artists not featured in an HDC. Further, we observe that women creators drive this effect, enhancing the daily growth of Spotify followers by approximately 3% more for women artists, underscoring the value of gender concordance. Our findings shed light on the role of short videos, especially through the vehicle of HDCs, in advancing women artists, while also promoting inclusivity within the digital music industry.