I think tiktok has some kind of algorithm or ai that can determine whether a song is too harsh or strange for the average user. They probably even assign each user their own value. The only other time I've been denied by them was when I made a song out of 60 cycle hum and pedals (so obviously incredibly noisy).
For this track, I tried to isolate the variable that was getting it flagged. It wasn't the visuals, different song worked just fine. It wasn't too much bass or volume, those were denied as well. And it wasn't the order of the song or any copyright infringement, I took out the couple of longer samples I used (which I owned the rights to use anyway). So finally, I tried removing the parts of the song that were overly harsh or aggressive, and it uploaded in seconds while every other attempt took several minutes before being denied.
This would help explain why a lot of music on tiktok is kinda vanilla. There's some amazing artists on there, for sure, but we're not finding something as strange as originally discovering death grips was on /mu/ over a decade ago. Even the more established extreme genres just tend to sound a little more washed out and dreamy on the app, like the app is terrified of presenting something uncomfortable or strange out of fear the user might leave the app forever.
Thank you for sharing, I enjoyed that