Is Djo's 'End of Beginning' the beginning of the end for TikTok as a music discovery platform?

If you've scrolled on TikTok in the past week you've likely heard the refrain "And when I'm back in Chicago" over, and over, and over again.

The snippet comes from the platform's latest runaway hit, Djo's 2022 song "End of Beginning." It's soundtracked a whopping 2.2 million videos and counting on the app — a truly spectacular jump from last month's 18,000.

With users addicted to nostalgia, its unsurprising that the cinematic, dream-pop song took off on TikTok. It lends itself to yearn-posting for a city you've since moved away from, fan edits of The Bear, and it has the added bonus that it's written by someone the platform already loves, Joe Keery — the actor who plays fan-favorite Steve Harrington on Stranger Things.

But there's one thing about the virality of "End of Beginning" that's different, making it virtually inescapable on the platform.

At the end of January, Universal Music Group (UMG) pulled its catalog from TikTok after negotiations dissolved between the music giant and the social media platform. UMG cited "appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users" in an open letter as three key issues TikTok failed to address. In February UMG removed all songs controlled by Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG), which includes any song that a UMG signed-artist wrote or co-wrote. TikTok estimated that UMG owned 20 to 30 percent of the popular music on the platform.

The ubiquity of "End of Beginning" is the first death knell for post-UMG TikTok. It's a moving song, but its omnipresence is a sign of the lack of music on the app. In the past, there could have been a dozen songs going viral on TikTok in any given week, and now our FYPs are either repetitive or music-less. It's long been an engagement hack to use a trending song for an unrelated video, and with only "End of Beginning" and a couple others that don't compete with its stats ("Austin" by DASHA has been used in 353,000 videos, Madison Beer's "Make You Mine" sits at 236,000 videos, even Beyoncé's "TEXAS HOLD 'EM" is only at 644,000) what used to be a hub for music discovery now sounds stale and monotonous.

Frustrated users took to making videos about the oversaturation of several songs on their FYPs. One TikTok about "End of Beginning" reads, "Realize that bro's song was good until people started over using it" — and it has garnered 3.8 million views and nearly 400,000 likes. Another user, @itstweedle.dee, posted a video, pleading, "TikTok please don't make me block these songs." She went on to say, "I'm talking like every single video...back to back to back. I cannot breathe. My ears cannot breathe." The video received 2 million views and 200,000 likes.

On X / Twitter, a user posted the lyric "When I'm back in Chicago" with a video of someone being shot to convey how sick of hearing the song they are. The post scored 18,000 likes.

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Without UMG's catalog, the platform must adapt or users may turn elsewhere.