TikTok is the leading platform in music discovery right now, and we can help you build the following needed to get your next release heard.
Nobody anticipated the way TikTok would revolutionize the music industry. In a few short years, the video-sharing app has catapulted hundreds of songs onto the charts and helped countless artist elevate their career. It’s also become one of the most widely used social media platforms on the planet, with more than 1-billion downloads worldwide and daily users that number in the hundreds of millions.
As soon as Lil Nas X and “Old Town Road” to pop culture by storm, industry executives everywhere began flocking to TikTok in hopes of finding the next big thing. Artists, seeing how the once unknown rapper became a household name, followed suit.
But time has taught us that many musicians still don’t know how to build a following on TikTok. Going viral on the app is not as easy as some make it seem, and getting your song to takeoff is even more challenging. For every artist who cuts through the noise, hundreds, possibly thousands, do not.
You and your music deserve to be heard. TikTok can launch artists from any genre into the global spotlight, but you cannot achieve that success level through promotional posts alone. TikTok’s algorithm is brilliant, and overcoming it requires active participation in the app’s massive community.
In this Music Biz update, host James Shotwell shares five growth strategies for musicians. These tips are easy to implement and can make a massive impact on reach and engagement in as little as one month.
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Just days after the US Department Of Commerce announced plans to ban TikTok, the social media app lives on thanks to a potential sale.
TikTok is fully operational in the United States as of today, September 22. The social media app, which was set to be banned last Sunday, was spared its untimely fate thanks to a last-ditch effort from Oracle and Wal-Mart to purchase the company over the weekend. President Trump has approved the sale in principle, but conflicting reports from the companies involved leave many questions unanswered.
According to Variety, virtually every person and every company involved in the acquisition of TikTok disagrees on the terms of this deal. The deal approved by Trump allegedly makes Oracle the cloud provider and host of TikTok. That means the company will move its data stateside, and that U.S. citizens will control the data.
Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, whose Beijing headquarters are at the center of the platform’s controversy, disagrees.
What isn’t disputed: Oracle plans to take a 12.5% stake, and Walmart will get 7.5% in pre-IPO equity in TikTok Global. The new company will be based in the U.S. and run on the Oracle Cloud platform. ByteDance will continue to maintain control over the A.I. algorithms that power the TikTok app’s video recommendations (and which ByteDance uses for the similar Douyin app, available in China). The deal values TikTok at as much as $60 billion, according to reports by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.
Trump previously claimed the only adequate deal would be one where a US-controlled TikTok. ByteDance claims it will retain majority control, as it believes the remaining 80% of pre-IPO equity belongs to them, but that might not be true.
To make sense of this, Music Biz News host James Shotwell put together a video explaining how we got here and what may happen next.
President Trump's executive order against Bytedance-owned TikTok goes into effect this Sunday, September 20.
President Trump’s executive order against Bytedance-owned TikTok goes into effect this Sunday, September 20.
The US Department of Commerce announced on Friday, September 18, that the maintenance and distribution of TikTok in US app stores would be prohibited starting Sunday, September 20.
Friday’s news follows a series of threats from the Trump administration toward TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and other Chinese-owned tech companies. The president began that such bans would happen in early August alongside allegations that the Chinese government could use the data collected by tech companies against the United States.
Starting Sunday, September 20, TikTok will disappear from both the Apple and Google app stores. Consumers who already have the app will still be able to access its content and create new videos until November 12. No further updates will be accessible, which may cause a degradation of service over time.
“The only real change as of Sunday night will be [TikTok users] won’t have access to improved apps, updated apps, upgraded apps or maintenance,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Friday morning on Fox Business.
“Today’s actions prove once again that President Trump will do everything in his power to guarantee our national security and protect Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Ross. “At the President’s direction, we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations.”
ByteDance may save TikTok’s presence in the states by making a deal with an American-owned corporation to house data stateside. Several corporations have expressed an interest in such partnerships, and some have floated the idea of purchasing the platform altogether. As of this posting, no deals have been made.
The complete loss of TikTok would be a major blow to music discovery at a time when the entertainment business is already in dire straights. The platform has launched dozens of careers in recent years, including breakout talent such as Lil Nas X and ppcocaine.
Additional updates on TikTok are likely to surface in the coming weeks. Follow Haulix on Facebook and YouTube for news.
As the world waits to see if the United States follows through with a TikTok ban, Instagram’s competing service Reels feels dead on arrival.
Instagram launched its long-teased Reels feature at the beginning of August. A direct competitor to TikTok, Reels allows users to post 15-second clips set to music and other sounds they share with the global Instagram community. Its release follows the news that President Trump will be banning TikTok in September, but so far, the rollout isn’t taking the world by storm.
On the surface, Reels should be a hit. The feature looks and feels a lot like TikTok, which boasts more than a billion users worldwide. Users can browse through a seemingly endless collection of user-generated content set to catchy and humorous audio that provides a quick escape from the hellscape of 2020. Content creators can also use the sound from other creators’ clips, a tool that helped songs like “Old Town Road” from Lil Nas X go viral on TikTok.
But there is a problem—actually, more than one.
Reels may have the look and feel of TikTok and a large potential user base, but it suffers from being a small part of a much larger platform. To find Reels, users must first open Instagram, navigate to their explore page, and click on the Reels option at the top of the page. That is two more steps than TikTok, and the problems continue from there.
TikTok users have two feeds of content two choose from; one that they curate themselves through follows, and another that is generated by the platform’s algorithm. Reels only offers one feed, and it combines algorithmic predictions with what users want with the people they follow. You cannot follow someone in Reels alone, so any Reels creators someone follows will have photos and videos from those creators appear in the user’s main Instagram feed.
Then there is an issue with the length of Reels clips. TikTok allows users to make their content up to one-minute long, but Reels limits clips to fifteen seconds. That may be enough time to do a quick dance or lip-sync, but it places a seemingly unnecessary cap on creative expression.
Many of Reels’ most significant flaws stem from a core misunderstanding of why people use Instagram as opposed to TikTok. Instagram is a social network people use to give friends, family, and followers a glimpse into their lives. It is, in many ways, a carefully-curated glimpse into someone’s private life (or the life they want you to believe they lead). TikTok, on the other hand, is made with entertainment in mind. Most users don’t share personal content, just memes. It’s about making people laugh or smile or momentarily forget about whatever is bothering them. As the kids say, “it’s not that deep.”
However, all hope is not lost. Reels could become a go-to platform for creatives, but to do so, Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, need to reconsider their goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to entertain, and if so, how do you make that clear? Give users the ability to curate a Reels-specific following and make it easier to find the app’s feature. Facebook could even take things one step further and make Reels a standalone app for content creation that allows for cross-posting to Facebook and Instagram.
Instagram has built a large part of its business by stealing ideas that other services made famous. Its popular stories feature, which is the most used part of the app, is a variation of a similar tool that Snapchat brought to the public years prior. Similarly, though with less exciting results, IGTV is a variation of YouTube. These features both had their fair share of growing pains, but the longterm value is worth the effort needed to make them right. Reels could be the next ‘borrowed’ idea that hits big, but it’s not there-at least, not yet.
TikTok promotes itself as a platform where creatives can become stars overnight, but how exactly does that work?
TikTok has quickly become the premier music discovery platform on the planet. More than half a billion people use TikTok every month, and they are helping raise a new generation of talent that may otherwise never have a chance at success. Lil Nas X is perhaps the best example of TikTok’s power, but since “Old Town Road” became a global sensation, more than a dozen additional artists have come out of nowhere to take the app’s community by storm.
But how does that happen? Algorithms play a part, of course, but how does a relatively unknown talent captivate an audience of millions in a matter of days or weeks with a single song? Could it really be talent alone?
Lol. No. Of course.
A recent feature from Rolling Stone found that the answer to this modern mystery is as old as the music business itself. Regardless of all the technological advances of TikTok boasts and its incredibly inventive userbase, money is the common trait amongst every success story. Artists and labels alike are pouring thousands of dollars into each song promotion. Influencers receive cash to create clips that inspire their millions of followers to imitate their behaviors and continue using a specific song or sound.
The biggest moneymaker on TikTok is Charli D’Amelio, a twenty-something that demands around $30,000 per song promotion. Other influential creatives charge between $2,000 and $20,000 per placement, but again, there is no guarantee of success.
In this episode of Music Biz, host James Shotwell demystifies how songs succeed on TikTok with a straightforward answer that will not appeal to everyone. He also expresses caution for artists that may be considering influencer marketing for their next single. Check it out:
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TikTok is growing faster than ever thanks to Coronavirus, and artists on the platform are witnessing a surge in engagement.
If you thought TikTok was the latest in a long series of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ social media platforms – think again. The video-sharing app is growing in leaps and bounds, especially in light of COVID-19. The novel coronavirus is forcing everyone to stay inside, so anyone not yet converted to the world of TikTok now has plenty of time to assimilate.
Artists on TikTok are benefitting from the rise in content and new users in significant ways. After Lil Nas X, Ashnikko, and Blanco Brown took off in 2019, the latest crop of talent building massive followings on the platform is more diverse than ever. There are newcomers to mainstream pop, such as Jack Harlow and Doja Cat, as well as countless independent musicians whose current level of success is owed almost entirely to the TikTok community. Still, others are the kind of bizarre talent that only sees recognition because the internet loves weird things.
Some songs succeed on TikTok after users create action-based trends with a specific track. One recent example of that would be Powfu’s single, “Death Bed (Coffer For Your Head).” Users have paired the song with clips of themselves expressing their previously unspoken feelings for close friends. Check it out:
The majority of TikTok users are young. 66% of the app’s audience is below thirty years old, and many of its most famous users are younger than twenty. More than 800 million people use TikTok every month. The average user spends 52-minutes on the app per day. That engagement is exposing people to a lot of music, and that discovery is propelling many unknown artists and groups to success.
Even more impressive is TikTok’s engagement stats. TikTok has the highest follower engagement rate in social media. The average post receives engagement from 8-9.5% of the account’s following. That figure doesn’t count the engagement on posts found by users browsing the platform’s many video feeds, which are far easier to navigate than Twitter lists or Instagram’s ‘For You’ page.
Still, finding the next big thing by scrolling TikTok posts can be difficult. The app currently has no chart system in place, so the only way to understand what songs are popular is to watch a lot of videos.
Every label and artist would love to experience the level of viral success TikTok can provide, but users of the platform tend to enjoy hip-hop and pop music more than any other genre. The artists seeing the most success on the app often blur genre lines while delivering infectious and straightforward melodies. As a result, a great hook or strong opening can mean more than the quality of a song overall.
We cannot tell you how to make TikTok users fall in love with your music. We are researching that topic, but so far, the best advice anyone has given us is to ensure your songs are as immediately catchy as possible. To further prove this point, we took the most popular songs on the platform right now (April 1, 2020) and put them into a Spotify playlist. Check it out:
With multiple songs going viral on TikTok simultaneously, Tokyo’s Revenge is the video-sharing platform’s first breakout star of 2020.
Ask any regular TikTok viewer if they know a rap song that features a barking ad-lib, and their brain fills with flashbacks to countless clips. Ask that same user if they also know a song that features the line, “that’s a thot,” and their eyes will roll back as another avalanche of memories featuring looping videos with dancing people floods their brain. These tracks are commonplace on TikTok, and they have been for the better part of three months.
Both songs are the creation of Tokyo’s Revenge, a fast-rising rapper hailing from Connecticut. The young artist has never revealed his real name or age, and according to a recent interview with Complex, he prefers anonymity.
He explains, “For now, while I’m still a dickhead, I can be like, ‘I’m 444 years old.’ I want to stay as anonymous as possible”. Adding, “I don’t really care that much, but I try to hold back as much information as possible, so people think about me and the music separately.”
Tokyo’s Revenge began posting music online in 2018. His first taste of success came with the release of “GOODMORNINGTOKYO!” on Soundcloud in the summer of 2019. The track went viral on the music-sharing platform, amassing millions of plays, but the music industry at large barely noticed his rising profile.
In November 2019, Tokyo’s Revenge again went viral with the release of “THOT!” The song, which references Drake and lasts under three-minutes, feels built for the social media age. The track features a hypnotic beat backing lyrics that display intelligence and humor in equal measure. It’s the kind of song you cannot shake, one that lodges itself inside your mind and plays on repeat at all hours of the day.
According to Google Trends, Tokyo’s Revenge has skyrocketed in popularity since the beginning of December 2019
Both neither “GOODMORNINGTOKYO!” Or “THOT!” would be a topic of conversation today without TikTok. Beginning in December 2019, both tracks found a massive audience on the ByteDance-owned platform. The first to win over users was “THOT!,” which was aided in part by a viral dance trend.
To date, the original upload of “THOT!” has inspired more than 200,000 TikTok videos, with countless more created from remixes and separate (unauthorized) uploads.
Fans of “THOT!” soon learned that Tokyo’s Revenge has other songs tailor-made for TikTok clips. Pinning down who was the first to use “GOODMORNINGTOKYO!” is almost impossible given the current tools made available by the platform. Still, there are now more than 1.1 million videos using the song. The most popular trend amongst these clips is for content creators to act out the ad-libs. For example, people bark. Check it out:
It’s safe to assume there are more than 1.5 million TikTok videos in existence today that use music created by Tokyo’s Revenge. Those clips have millions and millions of views, which has helped both songs — as well as the rest of the artist’s catalog — find success on other platforms. “GOODMORNINGTOKYO!” has amassed more than 38 million Spotify streams and topped the platform’s viral songs charts. “THOT!” has more than 10 million Spotify streams and appears on dozens of popular playlists.
Tokyo’s Revenge has more than 50 million plays on his Spotify account and over 4.6 million monthly listeners.
The success of these two songs has gotten so massive that the industry is finally paying attention to the artist behind them. In the last month, Tokyo’s Revenge has been appearing in virtually every major hip-hop publication, as well as numerous music-related YouTube channels. Just last week, Tokyo’s Revenge and his producer, Clifford, did a Genius video breaking down the story behind “GOODMORNINGTOKYO!”
We’ve seen this kind of star-making success in the past with Ashnikko, Stunna Girl, and Blanco Brown. That said, the excitement around Tokyo’s Revenge feels different because he has multiple tracks going viral at once. Whether or not the young musician behind them can continue this trend of TikTok-ready creations remains to be seen, but with over 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, he’s already making enough money from music that he doesn’t need a day job. Aside from a record deal and RIAA certifications, what more could you ask for when you’ve barely released enough material to fill an album?
