TikTok Band The Future X to Headline Honda Civic Tour
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
TikTok’s first officially endorsed music group is going on tour.
The Future X will perform in seven cities as the headliners of the annual Honda Civic Tour. TikTok tapped former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller to scout for talent, and Fuller announced “the first group to be born on TikTok” earlier this year after finding Angie Green, Luke Brown, Maci Wood, Jayna Hughes, Sasha Marie, Tray Taylor, and Drew Venegas through the hashtag #NextInMusic.
The band joined Sony Music Entertainment’s Columbia Records and has been working on their first album in Malibu. TikTok previously struck a deal with SME to license its artists’ music, and Sony/ATV partnered with a TikTok-focused talent agency to tap new artists.
Previous Honda artists include big names like Blink-182 and Charlie Puth, making the relatively unknown The Future X a distinct change for the car company. The tour was virtual last year, with H.E.R. live streaming on Twitch. This year, each performance will be filmed exclusively for TikTok and the band will document the tour on the app.
Musicians recording their behind-the-scenes lives isn’t unheard of—One Direction charmed teens with YouTube videos during its stint on the X-Factor and again during its own Honda Civic Tour. Honda turning to TikTok to leverage its talent and platform points to the app’s prominence. A Honda marketing manager told Variety that the company’s decision was spurred by a desire to reach a wider audience online and engage younger viewers.
“American Idol” creator Fuller selecting stars from TikTok indicates the strength of the app’s roots in the music industry. Artists like Jax and Priscilla Block have found acclaim through their viral videos. Musicians that TikTok users deem inauthentic, however, have been met with backlash, which may not bode well for a band hand-crafted by a talent manager.
Though artists who built a following on the app have garnered acclaim, TikTok can be a double-edged sword—Halsey’s issue with their record label requiring viral videos to release a single sparked a larger debate on the app’s role in the industry.
Despite having only released a snippet of their debut single, The Future X has already performed in South America and Europe. What exactly the band will do when it launches the tour at The Roxy later this month has only been described as “entertaining TikTok content”—whatever that means.
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Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
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