In the TikTok era of music, artists have less than 15 seconds to hook an audience with a catchy enough song to keep them interested. Independent artist and producer from Los Angeles, Alex Sloane, is one of the artists utilizing the platform to reach an audience. Her recently released EP, “Dear Diary,” features self-produced songs that combine dreamy pop vocals with 8-bit-inspired beats. Sloane’s TikTok and Instagram feeds showcase clips of her writing in her diary, lounging in her heart-shaped bed, or going on earmuffed hot girl walks while her most popular hits play. Sloane is currently featured on two Spotify-curated playlists, “Fresh Finds Pop” and “Dope AF” (featuring TikTok star Bella Poarch on its cover).
Several of her most popular TikToks capitalize on the trend in which an unseen camera-holder asks a “stranger” what they’re listening to. In Sloane’s videos, she sports an annoyed expression while being asked, before excitedly naming one of her own songs and then running off in kitten heels or pink Uggs. In a video posted on Feb. 2, Sloane wears a The Cure t-shirt and decorates her left-handed bass “to make it cuter and pinker” while her song “Mine” plays. She describes her fashion and decor styles as being influenced by J-fashion and Kawaii. “I think a lot of Asian artists kind of play with that,” Sloane said. “It’s about juxtaposing hyper-femininity and horror and having that duality in your art.”
Sloane is the perfect candidate for TikTok virality. Dressed like a cross between Paris Hilton, a Bratz doll and an off-duty ballerina, her music is as bubbly as her wardrobe. Building off the sounds of hyperpop and artpop musicians like Melanie Martinez, Pink Pantheress, and Grimes (who follows Sloane on Instagram), Sloane’s bubbly beats and mellow, syrupy voice lend themselves to catchy hooks. As is the case with many bedroom pop artists, her melodies and lyrics often blend across one song to the next; to compound the effect, a 16-minute visualizer accompanies her latest EP. Beyond aesthetics, Sloane prides herself on being an independent producer; her Instagram bio reads: “music producer but like, a girl.” Although her recent viral singles “Mine” and “Kinda Hate U Kinda Love U” have garnered nearly one and two million listeners respectively on Spotify, she plans to continue producing her own music.
But at times, music takes a back seat from visuals and her overall aesthetic. “I feel like a lot of the interest hasn’t even been from the music. It’s just been like, oh, pretty stuff,” she laughs. Videos from 2022 show Sloane reading excerpts from her diary while sitting against a red, heart-shaped headboard; she describes being often asked if the bed was part of a set—but it is really where she sleeps.
Access to musicians and celebrities through TikTok provides a new, or at least higher, level of voyeurism to interacting with art. Creating and sharing a body of work is always relational, but to have the place where one lives, eats and sleeps become inseparable from their public-facing persona creates a different level of intimacy. Surely, this is part of Sloane’s appeal to her audience: she brings her fans along with her through every aspect of her creative process, with behind-the-scenes clips figuring heavily among her TikTok repertoire.
If you scroll to the bottom of Sloane’s TikTok page, past promos for the EP and videos of heart-shaped objects in her pink-and-red apartment, you’ll come across covers from 2019 of Clairo, Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish. Her hair is Strawberry Shortcake pink, and she plays acoustic with vocals that sound like a cross between Édith Piaf and Marilyn Monroe. Later videos include Sloane-produced beats, her hair turns platinum, and the backdrop and props change. Her videos start picking up tens, then hundreds, of thousands of views; a teaser video for her single “Kinda Hate U Kinda Love U” captioned, “what if… you bullied me into releasing this song” in pink font currently has nearly 500,000.
But Sloane doesn’t feel like she’s “blown up.”“I feel like my life is still very, very much normal,” said the young singer, who still holds a 9-5 job and makes her music in her spare time. Though Sloane has been producing music for seven years, it was TikTok that brought her an audience; now, she has over 87,000 followers and 3.5 million likes on the app. “TikTok has been like huge for me and for a lot of artists I know,” Sloane said. “The opportunity for people like me is just huge and insane. There was never any interest on the label side until TikTok.”
But the internet’s attention span is short—a 30-second video clip is often too much to get through. It is also rife with countless artists clamoring to get their music out there. Dealing with an exclusively online audience means constantly having to feed the beast. Sloane views the platforms she uses as a double-edged sword.
“There’ve been quite a few periods where I have something going and then I have an obstacle where I can’t put out music,” she said. “And then, all of a sudden, I’ll be hemorrhaging followers for weeks. And I’m panicked and freaked out. But then I get that momentum back again. So sometimes it can feel difficult. It feels like you’re on a hamster wheel.”
The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality has never quite worked in the music industry, where talent and skill often come second to whom you know. But for artists like Sloane — completely independent when it comes to songwriting, production, and mixing — working hard to consistently churn out content is the only way to maintain momentum. Platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels, with their complex and often-changing algorithms, will reward you with an audience if you work hard enough for it — if only for fifteen seconds.
