🎵 Top Sounds 🎵
Our curated picks of the top sounds on TikTok
Cupid 💘
This sound pairs with the John Cena CapCut filter in our effects highlight.
Lucky Girl ☘️
It’s kinda woo-woo, and that’s the appeal. It’s an affirmation and a song all at once.It’s (Almost) Summer 🌞
This sound is bringing summer energy to the fyp— and is perfect to pair with a GRWM, a ‘day in the life’, or similar.Inner Child Vibes 😝
If you have content about kids, parents, or education I need you to run to this sound. You can thank me later.This is a great sound to call out billionaires to. Does this mashup scream ‘eat the rich’? No but honestly, that’s part of the charm.
This sound reminds me of the year 2007. Just conceptually 2007. It’s got a certain indie-film heroine energy that’s vaguely charming and somewhat grating. It’s like if the froggy chair from Animal Crossing was a song.
🔉 Our Sound Highlight 🔉
Don’t Act Like Wes Anderson
Mood: 🎥
Symmetrical shots, a stationary camera, bright details, and vintage attire— AKA the unmistakable ‘Wes Anderson aesthetic’ has taken over TikTok with this sound from the director’s film The French Dispatch. Now, not everyone can match the director’s visual style. What even is his style anyway? It has ranged from the straightforward Bottle Rocket, the distinctly nostalgic Royal Tenenbaums, to the warm stop-motion animation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Perhaps it is the idea of a unified style (see: this 10-year-old SNL skit) that has made this trend so popular, as folks take to TikTok to imitate the director, or at least the idea of him.
🎥 Video Highlight 🎥
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Brand TikTok done right: The Teletubbies account. Yes, really. It isn’t that the Teletubbies page is giving Ryanair levels of unhinged, nor are they attempting to convert Laa-Laa and Po into the new Duolingo owls. No, they just had fun with a TikTok trend and had just the right amount of editing skills to make it enjoyable.
👹 Effects Highlight 👹
Use this CapCut template when you want to post about something that makes you happy.
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This CapCut template is for when you’re up to something (that you shouldn’t be).
🗣️ The Moment 🗣️
Issues that are at the forefront of online discourse— books
#Booktok is more than it seems.
It may be one of the most recognizable niches of TikTok. Just over one in five Americans has heard of the community. TikTok CEO Shou Chew even shouted it out more than once in his testimony to Congress. #Booktok is a force in publishing, a way independent and traditionally published authors alike have made sales. It’s even on tables in Barnes & Noble locations nationwide.
For the last few months, coverage of #booktok has centered on adult readers and consumerism. We’ve had article after article playing discourse badminton with the idea that TikTok is bad for literary culture. Yet, while YA and romance books made popular by the app seem to be the main targets for derision (hardly new for those genres) kidlit and literacy among young readers are bolstered by the app.
Banned books, and books likely to be banned, are being read by TikTok users, and shown to audiences of hundreds of thousands of viewers. It’s an interesting mobilization. Parents and teachers of TikTok are using TikTok to deliver stories that are now dangerous to share in classrooms. In the process, they are benefitting families, young readers, and adults whose first experiences with literature featured messages far less inclusive.
There is an opportunity for librarians, teachers, and those concerned about book bans to reach young readers— and the key is #booktok.
☕ The Zeitgeist ☕
Hot topics from across the internet
The girl behind the Snoopy Edits TikTok is no longer grounded! I am fascinated by the origin story of the Snoopy Edits TikTok and the recent media coverage. Vive la Snoopy!
Don’t yell about babies on planes! We all know babies are loud! They hate planes! Their tiny ears pop! But if you do yell about a baby, you better have a retort as good as “So is the baby!”
Apartheid Clyde continues in his quest to become the worst poster of all time too bad the paid blue check stans are his biggest competition.
The only noteworthy aside in the regularly scheduled Twitter drama is that dril (one of Twitter’s more infamous posters) made a #blocktheblue campaign.
Buzzfeed News has shut down, which will be a true loss to all of us. Including me, a humble newsletter writer, whose journey into this kind of writing was undoubtedly shaped by the journalism that came out of Buzzfeed News.
SCOTUS protected access to mifepristone which is a huge win for reproductive rights activists.
The layoffs hit Tucker and Don Lemon. I need an oral history of the drafting (and specifically the formatting) of this online statement.
🥡 The Takeaway 🥡
Lemon8 is on the rise and I am interested to see if the platform continues to grow.
I’m a humble millennial-cusper. I love a good photo-sharing app. I love to obnoxiously angle my phone above my meal and take sloppy mirror selfies (don’t worry, I have enough Gen Z sensibilities to hide my awkwardly posed photos in photo dumps). Lemon8 exists to fill the Instagram vacuum. It’s poetic, Shakespearean almost, to think Instagram might lose its monopoly on photo-sharing-based social media to a ByteDance company by copying another ByteDance company.
Lemon8 is a combination of Pinterest, and Instagram, with built-in editing features à la CapCut. The interface is familiar and user-friendly enough to attract creators from other platforms and weekly posting demand is fairly low (twice per week, per the information given by Lemon8 to creators).
For marketers, Lemon8 could be a great opportunity to target Gen Z. The app, presently, is overwhelmingly catered to female Gen Z users and ByteDance is said to be prioritizing adding educational and informational content to the platform. There’s a vacuum to fill and a TikTok success playbook to work from. While the future of the app will depend on users and creators, early signs show a space ripe for marketers.
We may not know where Lemon8 is going, but it presents an exciting opportunity for anyone trying to activate Gen Z audiences.