Liz B: Growing Music Through TikTok

Photo courtesy of Elizabith Bos

In your—let’s face it—endless hours of scrolling through Tiktok, you may have come across Liz B’s song, Keep on Walking. An indie pop song with rock influences, the song has been likened to mainstream artists like Clairo.

Elizabith Bos, better known as Liz B, is a 17-year old musician from Texas who found success not through contacting record labels, but by telling TikTok users to hit random buttons on her post. The buttons—follow, like, comment, share—play into TikTok’s algorithm to boost the spread of the video. This strategy resulted in her first viral video, which ultimately helped establish her success. Liz has amassed over 249,000 likes across all her videos, demonstrating the platform’s ability to launch many artists’ careers.

“TikTok is really dominating the music industry right now, and anything that does well on TikTok pretty much ends up on other platforms. It ends up really boosting your songs, especially if you can figure out how to use the algorithm to your advantage,” Liz said.

When posting the song to TikTok, Liz didn’t expect it to blow up; she just hoped that people would like it. Several people messaged her, asking what song she was playing after they tried to find the song online. She told them it was her song, and decided to post it to Spotify for them. Now, the song has over 211,000 streams.

While this is Liz’s first mainstream success, she isn’t new to making music. At the young age of 15, she got an electric guitar and GarageBand and has been creating music ever since. 

“I just feel like it’s given me this great ability to express myself and put what I’m thinking and feeling down. It’s like my favorite thing to do,” Liz said.

Liz describes Keep on Walking as a simpler song for her in terms of the writing process and listed Wallows, Gus Dapperton, Clairo, and other various bedroom pop artists as influences.

“It really just came to me,” she said. “I just got my guitar out while I was writing the song.”

While the song has a story behind it, Liz doesn’t plan to explain it to her listeners so they can leave it to their imaginations.

“I want people to be able to infer what the song is about, because I think it makes it more personal to them. The words kind of encompass other people’s experiences, with their boyfriends or whatever, so I don’t want to say what it’s about to me,” she said.

With the possibility of Donald Trump banning TikTok in November, many creators are worried about how they’ll bring their content to another platform. While Liz was originally worried about this in July, when talks of the app being deleted began, she’s unsure if that will actually happen now.

“I plan on releasing new music, and I know I would come to TikTok to promote it, so I don’t know how I would really get it out there for everybody to see if there was no TikTok,” Liz said.

Unlike other social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Snapchat, it’s easy for anyone to find success on TikTok if they land up on users’ personalized ‘for you’ page. The ‘for you’ page is an endless feed that corresponds with users’ activity and shows them content based on what they interact with the most.

“It’s a huge utility for musicians and small artists. That algorithm really can boost anyone,” Liz said. “There’s not really an algorithm for Instagram; you really only see who you follow. And you get lucky if you can get a viral video on YouTube, but literally everybody can get a viral video on TikTok.”

If TikTok does get banned, Liz plans to take her music to YouTube. However, the types of videos needed to promote music there are different. YouTube often boosts videos lengthier than TikTok’s 1 minute, and they’re often focused on the artist rather than just the music. “It’s kind of nerve-racking to like, show me without my music, if that makes sense,” she said. 

For those waiting for a follow-up to Keep on Walking, Liz plans to release more music soon.Though she doesn’t know when she’ll release her next song, Liz has some songs prepared, in addition to some older songs on her SoundCloud that she may rerecord. She plans on waiting until she’s ready before announcing it as a surprise. Some of the songs have similar sounds to Keep on Walking, but she plans to also branch out to different styles.

“I understand how to make other sounds, so I will be releasing music that sounds a little bit different,” Liz said. “I think it will generally fit together, one way or another. My next song sounds like it goes next to Keep on Walking, but I’m kind of interested in making music that sounds different because I think it, you know, flexes my creative muscles a little bit.”

Check out Keep On Walking here: