In December, 2020, after spending nine months of the pandemic at home with her family, Katherine Li began posting her music on TikTok. "There was nothing else for me to do," Li, who is a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Toronto, told me when I visited her in Oakville, a leafy Toronto suburb, where she had holed up during the lockdown with her father, Chengwu, her mother, Xiaohong (who goes by Maggie), and her brother, Vincent, who is five years younger. She also has a sister, Alice, her elder by nine years.

"I was always in my room," Li went on. "With the keyboard, writing snippets of songs. I thought, What am I going to do with these? Oh, I'll put them up on TikTok!"

Like many Gen Z kids, Li grew up steeped in social media (she started using Instagram in third grade) and in music, much of it transmitted visually. When Maggie Li was pursuing her master's degree in economics at the University of Ottawa, Katherine was born, in 2003, and Maggie would put the crib in front of the TV with music videos or music-oriented programming playing while she studied. As a tween, Katherine became obsessed with Nickelodeon's "Victorious," a sitcom about a teen musical artist, played by Victoria Justice; Ariana Grande was among the cast members.

"I'd see all the music and think, That looks so fun! I really want to do that!" she told me. By the end of middle school, she was still thinking, I believe in myself, and I can totally do this!

Her mother had imagined Katherine's future differently. The Lis, who speak Mandarin at home, left Beijing for Canada in October, 2001, "in search of a better life," as Chengwu Li, a mechanical engineer, put it. Their middle daughter was an outstanding student. "The best in everything," Maggie told me, with fierce pride. She thought that Katherine would attend medical school and become a pediatrician. Alice was the performer in the family. She sang, modelled, acted, danced, and won beauty pageants. "I've looked up to her my whole life," Katherine said, of her big sister.

Katherine began piano lessons in first grade, and could sight-read music. Her showpiece was Richard Clayderman's "Mariage d'Amour." But, apart from singing in the choir at school, and occasionally busking with Alice (who was chosen as an official subway musician by the Toronto Transit Commission), her only public vocal performances were the YouTube videos she made in her room, in which she sang covers of songs by Taylor Swift, Julia Michaels, and Shawn Mendes. She hoped to follow the bedroom-to-Billboard path blazed by her countryman Justin Bieber, who was discovered on YouTube in 2008, and, more recently, by Mendes himself, another Canadian, who broke out in 2013 on Vine, a short-form-video platform. But Katherine Li's YouTube videos did not go viral. Fifty views, mostly friends, was a good showing. She began to doubt herself, wondering, Are people interested? Is this realistic?

In 2014, Li downloaded Musical.ly, an app for sharing short, user-generated videos which had been launched in Shanghai that year by two Chinese entrepreneurs, Alex Zhu and Yang Luyu, and quickly became popular in the U.S. She posted videos of herself lip-synching and dancing to trending songs on the app. In 2017, Musical.ly was bought by ByteDance, a Chinese startup that had previously created Toutiao, an algorithmically fed news aggregator; Douyin, a short-form-video platform available only in China; and TikTok, a Douyin-like app for the rest of the world. ByteDance engineered a new algorithm for Musical.ly, and merged its users with those of TikTok.

By mid-2021, thanks to teen-agers like Li, TikTok had reached a billion active monthly users. Facebook, by comparison, which was launched in 2004, has 2.9 billion monthly users. TikTok users skew younger. Sixty-seven per cent of all American teen-agers use the app, and their parents are joining now, too. According to the data-analytics company Sensor Tower, the average user spends ninety-five minutes on the site—almost twice as long as they linger on the Gram.

At first, Li was only a viewer, rather than a "creator," as TikTok flatteringly refers to anyone who uploads videos. To soundtrack their videos, TikTok creators can choose from a vast library of licensed sounds, which are mostly parts of songs, and which vary in length from a few seconds to a minute. The genius of TikTok's business model is that the entertainment is almost entirely composed of user-generated videos, which cost a tiny fraction of the seventeen billion dollars that Netflix, for example, spent on professional content in 2021. TikTok is reportedly on track to make nearly ten billion dollars in revenue this year, mostly by selling ads against what is essentially free programming. Even so, this figure is still well short of the hundred and eighteen billion dollars that Facebook made in 2021.

"I was on the 'For You' page a lot," Li told me. The "For You" feed is algorithmically tailored for each TikTok user; like snowflakes, no two "For You" feeds are exactly the same. Instead of the app displaying content that you've chosen to see from a collection of friends and other accounts that you've curated yourself, a machine-learning algorithm is your curator. Drawing on your usage patterns, your account settings, and data from your device—which could include information about people who are contacts in your phone, Facebook friends, and people you have sent TikTok links to or opened links from—the app predicts what content you really want to see. If you post a video in which you appear, biometric and demographic information that includes gender, ethnicity, and age could be scraped from your face and potentially added to the data slurry.

Mainly, though, the TikTok algorithm relies on the "signals" harvested from your responses to your "For You" feed: likes, comments, and the length of time you watch a video before swiping to the next one, by flicking your fingers up the screen. Every action, or lack of one, tells the A.I. something about your level of "engagement"—the caviar of social metrics. A user who swipes through thirty fifteen-second videos, say, provides the TikTok algorithm with many more signals than YouTube gets from a user who watches one seven-and-a-half-minute video on its platform. Those signals, in turn, allow the TikTok algorithm to home in more closely on your private desires. After a couple of hours of swiping, TikTok users get bespoke recommendations that make other feeds feel off-the-rack. "The TikTok algorithm knows me better than I know myself" is a Gen Z utterance I heard often in my reporting.

Li's first original posts featured her singing sweet-sad melodies with lyrics about high-school crushes, a TikTok-enabled genre loosely defined as "bedroom pop." She felt empowered on the platform, where, on any given day, the algorithm can make almost any creator's video go viral, regardless of how many followers she has, which is not the case on YouTube.

O.K., this is my chance, Li thought.

The music industry has been the canary in the digital-content coal mine ever since Napster made music free, in 1999. As technology has steadily altered the form recorded music takes—vinyl records became cassettes, then CDs, then MP3s, then streams—the industry has found new ways to monetize the thing that never changes: the emotional connection a song creates between an artist and a fan.

After lean years early in the new millennium, when the industry saw CD sales crater while its technophobic leaders dithered over converting to file-sharing, the major labels figured out how to turn streaming to their advantage. In recent years, the three majors—Universal, Warner, and Sony—have aggressively enforced copyright and pushed Spotify and other streaming platforms to hand over as much as seventy per cent of their revenues; the profits from, and the value of, the music catalogues the labels own have soared. In 2021 alone, the value of global copyrights rose eighteen per cent, to $39.6 billion, according to a recent report by the author and former Spotify chief economist Will Page.

Now music is meeting a kind of metaverse, in the form of the rapidly evolving platform of sound, video, social media, and marketing that is TikTok. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok had become a potent music-discovery tool. In one minute on the site, a user like my fourteen-year-old daughter, Rose, might swipe through twenty or more brief videos, each with a short piece of a song synched to it by the video's creator. Some songs are new, but many are decades old. If Rose hears an interesting sound—Smashmouth's "Walkin' on the Sun," for example—she can click the record icon at the bottom and go to the sound page, where she can see the artist and the song name. Then, in theory, she can go to Spotify, Apple, or another distributed streaming platform, where the whole song can be streamed and its owners paid. (In reality, she goes to YouTube, where the stream pays, too, but at a lower rate.) On a distribution platform, a song's owners are paid per stream, but on TikTok there is no set royalty structure in place, and it provides only negligible income, a growing point of tension with the music industry.

The videos function as a kind of trailer for the songs, but, instead of a song's owners being in charge of the production, TikTok creators can synch the sound to videos they've made about almost anything, provided they stay within community guidelines, which forbid nudity and abuse. They can also slow down or speed up music, in accordance with the latest TikTok trend. Syco Entertainment, founded by Simon Cowell, recently announced that sixty seconds of "Red Lights," a new song co-written by the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin, Savan Kotecha, and Ali Payami, would be made available for remixing by TikTok creators before its release.

One of TikTok's early champions within the music industry was Ole Obermann. In 2018, when he was the chief digital officer at the Warner Music Group, he had an "Aha!" moment about TikTok, he told me. "The only other time I had a similar moment was when I first used Spotify," he said, referring back to 2007. Partly because of TikTok's merger with Musical.ly, an app that had been utilized primarily for tween lip-synching battles, many executives weren't using it. Obermann tried to make his skeptical colleagues understand that TikTok was going to be the next big thing. He likened user-generated videos, on which creators spend many hours, to the mixtapes people made back in the day—"the ultimate form of fandom," he said. To me, he described TikTok as a combination of elements of Top Forty radio, music television, and streaming: "There has never been anything that can get a song hooked in your head the way TikTok does it."

In March, 2019, "Old Town Road," a little known song by Lil Nas X, went viral on TikTok, thanks in part to a video by a twenty-one-year-old Boston-based creator named Michael Pelchat. In the video, Pelchat did a dance featuring a quick-cut costume change into a cowboy outfit (a "transition," in TikTok lingo), which was synched to the lyric "I got the horses in the back." An explosion of videos by other creators using the song and the same gimmick followed in the next few months. A remix of the song with Billy Ray Cyrus topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nineteen weeks, an all-time record, converting most remaining music-industry skeptics into TikTok champions. Pelchat earned five hundred dollars for his contribution to making "Old Town Road" a megahit. Lil Nas X gave him the money himself, saying, "Thank you, man, for changing my life, here's $500," Pelchat told Rolling Stone.

The "Old Town Road" rocket launch demonstrated the essential role that creators' videos play in a song's viral trajectory. The videos could potentially spread a piece of the song to hundreds of millions of listeners, who might then stream the original version on another platform. TikTok also proved that it could make hits out of songs that bricked at first. "Sunday Best," a track by Surfaces, a Texas-based electro-pop duo, became extremely popular on TikTok in early 2020, a year after its release, when the line "Feeling good, like I should" was synched to dance videos. The song was rereleased to radio that March, at the start of lockdown, and turned into a global smash.

Finally, TikTok showed that a forty-year-old hit could chart again. When a video selfie made by Nathan Apodaca, in which he skateboarded and drank cran-raspberry juice from a bottle while vibing to the first lines of Fleetwood Mac's 1977 track "Dreams"—"Now, here you go again, you say you want your freedom / Well, who am I to keep you down? / It's only right that you should play the way you feel it"—went crazy viral, the song returned to the Billboard charts, in October, 2020. A month later, Stevie Nicks, who wrote the song, sold the publishing rights to most of her catalogue, including "Dreams," for a reported hundred million dollars. Apodaca, who was homeless at the time he made the video, earned no royalties, but he did receive donations, and Ocean Spray gave him a pickup truck loaded with juice; he also scored a recurring role on the most recent season of the Hulu comedy "Reservation Dogs."

By then, Ole Obermann had left Warner Music for a new gig: global head of music at TikTok.

Katherine Li had already seen other musicians blowing up on TikTok. There were new superstars like Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion, whose hit song "Savage" caught fire on the platform in the spring of 2020. But both artists' careers had predated TikTok, and they had major-label backing. Although Li, like virtually all TikTok creators, longed for fame, she couldn't imagine being that kind of famous herself. She could, she told me, relate to "these smaller artists on TikTok, who were also getting so much exposure." In 2020 alone, more than seventy new artists who broke out on TikTok signed contracts with record labels. "In a pre-TikTok world, it was hard to draw a crowd, and artists used that process to hone their craft," Billy Mann, a Grammy-nominated producer, songwriter, and record executive, told me, of the traditional route to a record deal—performing live to growing audiences. "Now you can start with a crowd in your phone and pray that craft catches up."

Li was intrigued, too, by D.I.Y. TikTok artists who were monetizing their music careers through influencer deals with brands. That way, they could often keep the rights to their songs. She also cited Taylor Swift to me as a music-business role model. Swift is currently rerecording albums that she made earlier in her career for Big Machine, a Nashville-based independent label distributed by Universal, in order to regain control of her "masters," the industry term for the original sound recordings—those copyrights are separate from the lyrics and melodies in the composition, known as the "publishing." Scooter Braun, Big Machine's then owner, sold Swift's masters to Shamrock Holdings, a Disney-family investment vehicle, against the artist's wishes. The "Taylor's Version" masters are her revenge.

"I learned from Taylor," Li said. "You keep control of your masters."

Swift built her career during the file-sharing era, which changed the business model for many artists, shifting the main source of revenue away from recorded music, which can be pirated, and toward ticket sales to live events. The pandemic ended the touring economy almost overnight. Live-streamed concerts tried to fill the void, but they were pale substitutes for the real thing. With everyone stuck at home, TikTok became the show.

Tours returned in full force in 2022, but the TikTok algorithm has remained the sun around which the music industry orbits, and the arbiter-in-chief of what's hot. Top Ten songs on radio and streaming charts often start trending first on TikTok. As many as a hundred thousand new tracks are now released by record labels and individual musicians every day on any number of platforms. Having a viral video attached to part of a song is one of the few ways to capture anyone's attention. Virality also tilts the arcane economics of streaming in the copyright holders' favor, because the worth of any single stream is based on the percentage of a streaming platform's total monthly streams that the song commands. In other words, a lot of listens in a short amount of time will make you more money per stream than a slow-burner will.

But how does the algorithm launch viral trends on TikTok? Machine learning is a form of A.I. that identifies patterns in data and makes predictions and recommendations based on them. Because of the complexity of their calculations and the sheer volume of data they ingest, the exact workings of powerful A.I.s like TikTok's are difficult to comprehend. Still, there are theories about TikTok's algorithm. The batch theory holds that the algorithm shows new content to small batches of users around the world, and, if a video gains traction somewhere, the app sends the video to a larger batch of users, and then a still larger one. Within the batch theory, there are more theories about how a video gains traction in the first place. Some hold that the ratio of likes to views is the key metric. For others, it's whether people stay with a video to its end. Some combination of all these factors is probably at play. TikTok itself has confirmed aspects of this on its Web site, but without much granularity. There is no shortage of YouTube videos or Reddit threads probing the mysteries of the recommendation algorithm for users who suspect that it is being periodically tweaked by ByteDance engineers.

Viral videos aren't new, of course, but attempting to incorporate virality into the way artists are discovered and their songs are marketed is. For label executives looking to sign and develop new talent, the challenge is to understand why a song goes viral on TikTok in the first place. Is it the music, or is it the artist's personality? Or is it the creator who started a dance trend synched to the sound? Or is it the flash of a tattoo on a hunky creator's biceps, or the glimpse of a creator's cleavage as she bends to press Play before doing her slinky dance?

"You could be gaining eyeballs and fans for things other than music," Mike Caren, a former president of A. & R. at Warner Music, told me when I went to see him at APG, a boutique label in Beverly Hills, where he is the C.E.O. Caren, who is forty-five, and who started in the business as an intern at Interscope Records when he was fifteen, went on, "Or, you could have songs that go viral because of a six-second line in the song, but then when people hear the whole song they go, 'This sucks!' So you have to see through all that and ask, Is it really about the music?"

Industry gatekeepers have always used data to try to gauge how deeply a song or an artist connects with fans. Radio programmers have long relied on "call-out research," derived from playing a song's hook for a focus group, to help predict whether the song will be a hit. TikTok does something similar, automatically. It offers real-time global call-out data on every sound on the platform, new and old.

Likewise, record executives have scouted talent online since the early years of YouTube, which launched in 2005 and was purchased by Google in 2006. But before the pandemic few would have signed an act without first hearing the artist perform live. Caren recalled going to a basement club in London in 2010 to see an unknown artist named Ed Sheeran. "I had already seen data which led me to go," Caren said. "He opened for a rapper and there was a hip-hop d.j. on before him. And Ed walks out there with an acoustic guitar over his back. I thought, Oh, man, this is going to be brutal. People are going to turn their backs. But he managed to capture the entire audience, who were not there for him, because of his passion." That show, Caren said, was "another data point. But it wasn't a numerical metric." Warner signed Sheeran several months later.

During the pandemic, however, signing acts on the basis of social-media presence alone became the norm among the majors—your phone was the club—and the practice has persisted even as live shows have returned. Some music professionals say, with sadness, that if forced to choose between an artist with good numbers on social media but so-so music and one with great music but lacklustre "socials," they'd have to choose the former. Chioke (Stretch) McCoy, a veteran manager of top hip-hop acts, told me that he would always favor the artist's talent over the data, but he added that while TikTok was great for music it was not necessarily great for musicians, whom labels are treating as if they are as disposable as their songs.

Caren mentioned a TikTok artist who had recently had a viral moment. "If he had signed a deal last week, he would have gotten a couple of million dollars," he said. "If it takes him a couple weeks to close his deal, and the data keeps going up, it could get more expensive for us."

And if his data go down? "Some would back off. It's possible no one might sign him."

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, 2020, while Li was working on her college applications, she tried to write "an original snippet" of a song for TikTok, just a couple of lines generally, every other day. "Usually, I wrote it just thirty minutes before I posted it," she told me. With her phone propped up on a small tripod, she'd record the snippet, singing along to chords she played on a keyboard in her bedroom, and upload it to TikTok. In the morning, she would check TikTok as soon as she woke, then go downstairs and say, "Look, Mom, I got thirty views!"

"Woo-hoo!" her mother would respond gamely.

The Lis weren't overly concerned with the politics surrounding TikTok, which some governments view as a major security risk. India permanently banned the app in 2021. In 2020, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13942, which stated that TikTok's "data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans' personal and proprietary information." The Trump Administration sought to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to Microsoft, Oracle, or another U.S.-based tech company or be banned, but the bid stalled in federal court. A bill seeking to ban TikTok from government-issued devices, sponsored by Missouri's junior senator, Josh Hawley, is currently before Congress. Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, recently told lawmakers that TikTok raises national-security concerns. TikTok said in response, "As Director Wray specified in his remarks, the FBI's input is being considered as part of our ongoing negotiations with the U.S. Government. While we can't comment on the specifics of those confidential discussions, we are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns."

On December 23rd, Li sat at her desk and prepared to record a new snippet. Next to her was a handwritten list of goals for 2020, with a small box drawn beside each goal, checked or unchecked, depending on whether it had been accomplished. The box next to "Stay Off WiFi for One Day" remained unchecked.

Looking into her phone, Li sang all that existed of "Heartache," her latest song bite, closing her eyes, her long black hair falling over her forehead:

We're in a heartache
And I hope it's O.K.
That you're living rent-free
In my mind

The clip is entirely affectless—an authentic moment of pure lyricism. It's as though we were watching from the other side of a looking glass as a sweet, guileless girl shares what's in her heart in the privacy of her bedroom. Li's vocal tone on the word "heartache" carries a piercing note of sadness that may have sounded especially resonant that pandemic holiday season.

Li posted the video, climbed into her big, round bed under colored L.E.D. strip lights on the ceiling, and went to sleep.

Jacob Pace was nineteen when, in 2017, he assumed control of Flighthouse, a Musical.ly account that he helped transform into a studio for short-form videos for TikTok. At first, he told me, labels and publishers wanted Flighthouse to pay a fee for a license so that it could use copyrighted music, as is standard practice in TV and film. But Pace couldn't believe it. "They wanted us to pay them for using their songs!" he exclaimed to me recently, still incredulous at age twenty-four.

Bruh. What did you expect? That was how the industry survived Napster and its spawn: by leveraging the publishing and recording copyrights owned by the majors. But, with the rise of platforms like Musical.ly and TikTok, the century-old consumption-based model of royalty payments has been replaced by a collaborative model, in which rights holders and online creators are partners in the chancy enterprise of virality. As a social-media native, Pace knew what the music industry would soon grasp collectively: that the balance of power had shifted from the song and its owners to the netizens who could make the song go viral. A new economy of TikTok creator-influencers was emerging, who were selling lightning in a bottle, and Flighthouse became an apothecary of virality.

In 2019, Barbara Jones, a former marketing manager at Columbia Records who had had her own "Aha!" moment about TikTok, founded Outshine Talent, to represent TikTok creators and act as a conduit to the labels and brands that need their influence. Charli D'Amelio, one of Jones's first clients, was a teen-age competitive dancer from Norwalk, Connecticut, whose videos of herself doing choreographed dances to hip-hop songs in her upper-middle-class family home made her wildly popular on TikTok, a kind of Kardashian next door. By mid-2020, whatever song Charli chose had a decent shot at going viral. When Charli danced to "Lottery (Renegade)," by K Camp, the song exploded. (D'Amelio, who is white, was later revealed to have appropriated the choreography for her video from a Black creator, Jalaiah Harmon.) Likewise, "In the Party," by Flo Milli, got a spike from Charli's moves. But, unlike Michael Pelchat, who helped make "Old Town Road" go viral, D'Amelio, with Jones's assistance, monetized her influence.

Jones walked me through the prices that creators charge to boost songs, distinguishing between "initiators," who can start a fire under a song, and "accelerators," who add fuel to it. Lower-tier creators, with follower counts ranging from twenty thousand to a million, can charge between two hundred and fifty dollars and a thousand dollars a video; mid-tier creators, with millions of followers, get between a thousand dollars and three thousand dollars; and the upper tier, where such TikTok élite as D'Amelio dwell, can receive up to seventy-five thousand dollars for a post. However, Jones cautioned, "it's still so risky. You can't make something viral." Would Nathan Apodaca's "Dreams" video have gone viral if he'd been a paid influencer? All a digital marketer can do is closely monitor what's happening organically on TikTok, and then hire creators to juice the trend.

The Federal Trade Commission supposedly maintains oversight of these paid sponsorships in music, but in contrast to paid brand sponsorships, which are required to be labelled as ads, hired music influencers are rarely identified as such. One insider told me, of the way labels pay creators, "It's down and dirty—'Can you get it done tomorrow? We'll Venmo you.' " The practice is not unlike payola, except that it doesn't seem to be very heavily policed; it dwells in the same murky mixture of marketing and culture that extends across much of TikTok.

Jacob Pace went from Flighthouse to Pearpop, an influencer marketing platform founded by Guy Oseary, a longtime talent manager, and Cole Mason, a former fashion model, that connects labels and brands with TikTok creators. Creators with lesser followings can enter hundreds of different TikTok hashtag challenges listed on Pearpop. In a recent example, #frozenchallenge, the copyright holders of Madonna's 1998 hit song "Frozen" offered cash prizes of up to fourteen hundred dollars for the most viewed videos that were made using a trap mix of the original song, in the hope, one assumes, of increasing the copyright's value. (Oseary also manages Madonna.)

These hashtag challenges can themselves birth careers. Stacey Ryan, a twenty-two-year-old singer-songwriter from Montreal, blew up on TikTok last December with an "open verse challenge," in which she sang the first line of the chorus of an unfinished song, "Don't Text Me When You're Drunk," and invited creators to contribute verses and to "duet" with her. Forty thousand creator videos later, hundreds of millions of people on TikTok had heard the hook, which led to her signing a seven-figure licensing deal with Island Records, a division of Universal. She released a version of the song she collaborated on with one creator, Zai1k. Ryan's manager, Nils Gums, the founder of Creative House L.A., told me, "The leverage she gained through TikTok has allowed us to keep her masters as well as her publishing."

The morning after Li posted her new song, she checked her phone as soon as she woke up. "Heartache" had amassed seven thousand views overnight, far outdistancing any of her previous videos.

"Wow! That's a lot more than thirty!" her mother exclaimed after Li had come rocketing downstairs, shrieking. "I was just bouncing around off the walls!" Li recalled. It was her first viral moment. The video hit a hundred thousand views by that evening, and was close to a million within a week.

Having gone viral once, Li tried to make it happen again through the spring and summer of 2021. What had made that particular video so successful with the algorithm? She studied the comments, and responded to them. Users were generous, without the snark of Twitter or any traces of envy, the green-eyed monster that stalks Instagram. In follow-up videos, Li acted as her fans' relationship coach, advising them on their own heartbreaks. "They feel like me," she said, of her online community. "A thousand me's" from all over the world, including many from India and the Philippines.

In August, Li posted a new song fragment titled "We Didn't Even Date," which produced a second viral moment. A few weeks later, she got a call from two young men at Interscope Records, in Los Angeles. Sean Lewow and Max Motley, both twenty-four years old, had seen Li's videos in their "For You" feeds, which, like everyone in A. & R. these days, they rely on to spot new talent.

The music industry has always welcomed young people with hustle, and being Gen Z TikTok natives gave Lewow and Motley special status with the aging millennials they worked for. In addition to their Interscope gigs, Motley and Lewow were planning to start their own management company and label, with a focus on TikTok creators.

"We had two great conversations," Lewow said, of their calls with Li. "We told her, 'Yo, when these songs blow up on TikTok and you release them on YouTube, you're not actually able to monetize,' " because YouTube pays so little for a stream. They thought that "We Didn't Even Date" had potential, but it needed proper production, and they introduced Li to Joe Avio, an L.A.-based producer. They also suggested that Li "get back in the good graces of the algorithm," as Lewow put it, by teasing bits of the music before releasing the finished song.