Tik Tok and the Music Industry - a Budding Friendship

If you’re not familiar with Tik Tok, we’re not entirely sure where you’ve been for the last year. Even if you aren’t a user, you will be aware of the many viral Tik Tok videos that have trickled to other social platforms. The short form video content platform has quickly become a staple for marketing campaigns for music artists. 

The app is credited with the success of Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’, Lizzo’s ‘Truth Hurts’ and Sueco the Child’s ‘Fast’- the latter of which amassed 17 million Spotify streams after the song was placed in a popular TikTok creator’s video. 

On Tik Tok and the success of ‘Old Town Road’, Lil Nas X told Time Magazine- ‘I should maybe be paying Tik Tok. They really boosted the song. It was getting to the point that it was almost stagnant. When TikTok hit it, almost every day since that, the streams have been up. I credit them a lot.’  Using the hashtag #yeehaw, thousands of videos cropped up resulting in more than 67 million streams of the track. ‘Old Town Road’ reached fans, and grew in an organic way due to Tik Tok’s algorithmic push (which, unlike other platforms is based on the video’s popularity and not their followers, allowing a completely unknown curator to go viral). Lil Nas X has commented on how the exposure that TikTok gave him, was worth paying for. 

Lil Nas X’s streaming success could be attested to Tiktok’s feature of connecting directly to Apple Music- allowing fans that like the short snippet of the track they’ve heard, listen to it in full.  

Whilst Tik Tok itself does not allow music sales or ads, that doesn’t stop labels from getting in on the action, paying well known accounts to push their songs , and with such a vast audience of over 500 million active users, the potentially placed song could reach a whole new market.

In April last year, Tik Tok launched ‘Tik Tok Spotlight’, a programme which allowed the users to discover independent and unsigned artists. With the app being heralded as the new way to discover music , TikTok holds a lot of keys here, and the future for the app is indeed bright. We’re looking forward to seeing how it shapes the music industry this year.