Here’s Why Florence Welch Is Now a Fan of TikTok

While Florence + the Machine‘s Florence Welch was previously not exactly a fan of using TikTok to promote her music, she’s since come around, she reveals in an interview with The New Yorker.

She explained to the magazine that as she was preparing to release Dance Fever earlier this year, her label kept asking her what she was going to do on the video-sharing app to help promote the album, noting that going viral could potentially help boost streaming numbers. Her response to her label, according to Welch?

“Oh, I actively don’t want to go viral. Anytime anything of mine has gone remotely viral, it’s filled me
with dread. Any kind of attention that is not directly related to the work or an album, I don’t want it,”
she recalled. “My fans, the people who follow me, are not going to believe that I just suddenly decided to do TikTok.”

After her label asked her to engage more with the platform, Welch posted a video of
herself performing a snippet of her song “My Love” in March. She captioned the a cappella clip, “The label are begging me for ‘lo fi tik toks’ so here you go. pls send help.” The clip subsequently did experience some viral success — just as her label wanted. (Dance Fever subsequently peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 after its May release.)

Reading the comments on the post changed her mind about the platform, the Grammy-nominated artist told The New Yorker. “I found [the TikTok community] to be anarchic and hilarious and weird in a way that I really enjoyed,” she shared.

“I feel like it’s a platform on which you can be stranger,” she added. “Like, if I just want to drink fake blood in a graveyard, TikTok is an environment that would embrace that.”