Given that pretty much every artist has tried their hand at a livestream in the past year, dealing with streaming fatigue is a real challenge and finding a whole new angle is incrementally tougher. You can go major production (Blackpink, BTS), high concept (Dua Lipa) or pared back in a beautiful building (Laura Marling, Nick Cave).

Or, if you’re an artist as big as Justin Bieber, you become the poster boy/guinea pig for a major platform flexing its livestreaming muscles for the first time. 

His TikTok livestream took place on 14th February and inevitably had a heavy Valentine’s Day theme. “A pop superstar with a catalog full of love songs, Justin Bieber has always been a romantic at heart,” is how TikTok set it up ahead of the event itself. They even described it as “a Valentine’s Day Gift From Justin Bieber & TikTok” which was pushing it a bit. 

Beyond the thematic crowbarring on display here, the app was emphasising the fact that this marked a bold new step forward for it, calling the event “the first ever single-artist, full-length concert performance to air LIVE [their use of caps] on TikTok”. It was also the first time Bieber was performing songs from his 2013 album Journals live, all done via his TikTok account which has over 20m followers. 

Videos associated with the #JournalsLive hashtag had over 18m views by 16th February. One performance clip in particular on Bieber’s official TikTok account had 6.3m views by that date and a few others had crossed 4m views each. TikTok added that the whole performance had over 4m unique views – split across two broadcasts (due to timezone considerations). 

That’s all very impressive, but slightly further down Bieber’s grid on his TikTok profile was a video where he danced to a remix of ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ on Christmas Day and it had over 58m views. If nothing else, this is a sign of which heavily marketed calendar event drives the most engagement.