TikTok Is Taking Over India

NEW DELHI—On a hot afternoon on the lawns of a lavish country house south of India’s capital, Ronak Bhatia waited patiently for his shot at fame. He had followed an online ad posted by Celebrity Face, a New Delhi event company that holds regular talent hunts and celebrity shoots, and he was surrounded by hundreds of other contestants. Each of them had paid a registration fee of 1,000 rupees, or about $14, and filled out an application. Many had traveled from across the country just for this audition.

They eyed one another warily as Celebrity Face volunteers called out names in batches. Only about a dozen at a time got inside; bouncers were otherwise physically blocking the crowd from entering. Outside, dressed in a denim jacket, white shirt, and blue jeans, a look he had styled with spiked hair, aviator glasses, a handlebar moustache, and a goatee, Bhatia sat in a plastic chair and stared at the posters of teenage celebrities plastered across the walls enclosing the lawn. He knew everything about them. He was there because he believed that if he, a 19-year-old who had just graduated from high school, worked hard enough, his face could be up there next.

When his name was called, Bhatia walked into a waiting room with nine other contestants. There, Rakesh Dwivedi, the founder of Celebrity Face, gave them their instructions: “You have to make two videos in 15 minutes. In one you have to dance, and in the other [film] dialogue mimicry.” Some were then taken to a makeup room to get their hair puffed and their nose powdered, before finally being led to the audition.

In this last room was not a television-studio array of recording equipment, but a small circular flashlight and a smartphone holder attached to a single tripod stand. These people were indeed trying to make it as stars, but not in the movies or on television—they were in search of fame on TikTok.

In theory, TikTok is just an app where users post short videos, but in practice it’s the stage on which teenagers across the world are competing for attention, for celebrity, and, in India, for a completely different life.

TikTok was launched in 2017, and the following year, its parent company, the Chinese media business ByteDance, acquired Musical.ly, a social-media platform for sharing music videos, for $1 billion and merged it with TikTok. The app has since been downloaded by 1 billion people worldwide.

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Whereas Facebook and Twitter were built around making friends and adding followers, TikTok is about winning fans. It makes its users believe that they have a chance at global celebrity, irrespective of where they live, as long as they can get online and hold people’s attention for anywhere from 15 seconds to one minute. This promise is built into TikTok’s artificial-intelligence-driven interface: It shows its users content they didn’t ask to see, made by people they probably don’t know, “opening up,” the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote, “new routes to serendipitous discovery.”

Nowhere is the impact of this promise better represented than here in India. TikTok is currently the most downloaded mobile app in the country, with more than 200 million users, and it’s shaping a new youth culture in which millions of young people—in big cities and small villages alike—are trying to be TikTok’s next big star. The results are both magical and nightmarish.

When his turn in front of the selfie camera came, Bhatia lip-synched to a trending tune. His videos did not not make the cut. With just 130 followers on the app, Bhatia is still waiting for his viral moment. “Someday my video may be picked up” by TikTok’s algorithm, he told us. “It takes effort.”

When you click on TikTok’s icon, a music note rendered in neon, you are immediately taken to a vertical video spanning the length of your phone screen. It could be a sports highlight, cooking instructions, or an amusing clip of an animal, but in India, it most likely it will be a stranger lip-synching to a popular song. Music is at the core of TikTok’s design: Video creators have the option to choose from a library of sounds, copy a tune from another video, or make a split-screen duet with another user.

Though TikTok fame has regional variations—cheerleading clips are more prevalent in the United States, English lessons in India—its monetization follows a global pattern, from brand endorsements to YouTube channels and movie roles. One of the biggest TikTok stars in the U.S. is Loren Gray, a 17-year-old who amassed 35 million followers by posting videos of herself lip-synching to pop hits. Today she is herself a pop star, with album deals with Virgin Records and Capitol Records. In China, where the app is known as Douyin, Liu Qikun, who isn’t yet 20, has 10 million followers who watch his scripted comedy clips; he makes money by endorsing the country’s leading e-commerce company, Alibaba.

Indians feature high up on every list of the world’s top TikTok stars. This is for many reasons. More than half of India’s 1.3 billion people are under the age of 25, and more than 500 million Indians use the internet today, thanks to the growing penetration of cheap smartphones and mobile data. But not all of them can express themselves through neatly worded tweets or self-deprecating captions on Instagram posts. In fact, a large section of India’s first-time internet users—some of them illiterate, others speaking in local dialects—find navigating video-based platforms easier. From 2012 to 2018, the time spent by an Indian watching online videos grew from an average of 2 minutes a day to 52 minutes a day, according to a report by the media agency Zenith.