Florence Welch calls it the “sigh heard ’round the world.”
Tasked with creating some online buzz ahead of the release of the latest album by her band Florence + the Machine, the 35-year-old British singer pointed a camera at herself recently to record a short video for TikTok — a video that begins with her exhaling theatrically before she sings a few bars a cappella from her song “My Love.”
“The label are begging me for ‘low-fi tik toks’ so here you go,” she wrote in the clip’s caption. “pls send help.” For emphasis she signed off with a skull emoji, as if to tell her fans that this newfangled digital marketing effort was slowly killing her.
“I was really frustrated,” Welch tells the Los Angeles Times of her mindset in the TikTok, which went viral in the wake of a similar declaration by Halsey, who posted a video accusing her record label of holding a new song hostage until “they can fake a viral moment on tiktok.”
“ive been in this industry for 8 years and ive sold over 165 million records,” wrote Halsey in text that appears atop handheld footage of her listening to the song in question. “everything is marketing and they are doing this to basically every artist these days.”