Collaborative Creativity in TikTok Music Duets

On the social media platform TikTok, users are able to engage with each other’s content by using the Duet feature, which allows them to re-share another user’s video while also layering on additional content to the original video. Through this, the affordances of the Duet feature facilitate a distributed and collaborative creative process, in which we can observe the evolution of cultural artifacts through the different versions that are produced from user contributions. As a result, the open-ended nature of these collaborations positions engagement as both a creative and social act. In this paper, we identify the ways in which the Duet feature supports decentralized co-creativity and engagement between users. We find that the cumulative nature of an artifact’s creative evolution, along with the ability for multiple iterations of an artifact to develop in parallel, facilitates development of diverse creative artifacts.