Are artists making money on TikTok?
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Since its launch 4 years ago, TikTok has become one of the most widely used apps in the world. In 2019 alone, TikTok was the second most popular app in the world with over 800 million users.
But what does the success of the platform mean for artists whose music is featured on the app? Can artists make money on TikTok?
In a wildly successful rise for a completely unknown artist, producer Ricky Desktop is responsible for some of the app’s biggest dance crazes of 2020 including the viral hit Sharkboy Beat. In April 2020, Ricky had 0 followers on Spotify. As of October 1 st, 1.5 million monthly listeners stream Ricky’s music on Spotify. In total, there have been over 20 million unique TikTok videos made using his beats.
Are all of these big numbers converting to dollars? How can the average artist use the same strategies to promote their own work? For this, you need to understand TikTok’s unique interface.
To start, the app’s ability to get content in front of users (read: ‘Buyers’) is unmatched. TikTok’s unique user interface allows a song to reappear and be heard more times in a quick 30-minute scrolling session than a Top 40 radio hit traditionally gets played in an entire day. Yes, really. On average, the current Billboard #1 only gets played once every 3 hours.
A short, 15-second length TikTok post filtered through their special algorithm allows a song to gain a level of exposure that traditional platforms like radio have never been able to capture. Just a few minutes into scrolling on the app’s feed and you can feel this effect: the same catchy snippet dance combo is imitated by various users with the repeated beat becoming its own earworm, creeping into your head, and all but forcing the viewer to go look the full song up. This is the main way TikTok virality translates to streams and payments. There may be no more effective marketing than bombarding a user with a snippet of a song until they are forced to find it in its entirety.
However, the length of video is not the platform's only advantage. TikTok also invites participation and engagement between individual users more than any other social media platform.
In an interview with the Verge, Ricky Desktop explains when he sits down to make a beat for TikTok, he likes to imagine the dance people will do along to the track. He lets the dance moves of the moment inform how his songs are constructed and hopes that anyone should be able to dance to them with ease. For example, he uses a “signature triple beat” where dancers can hit a “Triple Woah” – advancing the evolution of the popular dance move “Woah” into triplet form. He chooses certain sounds, like the flute, not only because they are catchy, but because Ricky anticipates dancers will imitate playing the flute as a part of their routine.
Tailoring content is not unique to only the musicians on the platform, but to the content creators as well. Addison Rae, TikTok’s second most successful creator, gained much of her early fame through the utilization of the “Duet” feature. Duet allows one user to enter split screen mode and record themselves next to another user’s video. Addison has carved out a spot for herself by creating videos that can easily be replied to. Her dances look as though someone in the opposite frame has caused one of her actions, inviting hundreds and hundreds of response videos.
Ricky and Addison prove having good content alone is not enough to be successful on this new platform. What you post needs to invite other users to participate.
If you’re a music artist and thinking about entering the TikTok space, here are some things to consider:
1) TikTok pays royalties, but in a different way than other social media platforms. Unlike Instagram or Twitter, the royalties are awarded per video made with your song as opposed to how many plays a particular video gets. The incentive to make music that invites user participation is key here. However, focusing too heavily on hypothetical Tiktok dancers may constrain your creative process and distract what you, the artist, truly feels like making.
2) TikTok fame isn’t everything. If you aren’t interested in spending your career making beats for TikTok, the platform can still serve as a first step in a new landscape of music marketing. That is to say, every beat that you make for TikTok does not have to represent you as an artist. Outside of TikTok, songs like Ricky Desktop’s “The Chicken Wing Beat” aren't likely to have much commercial appeal. However, now that his name is out there, he has received a lot of new interest outside of TikTok to make the kind of music that we hear on Spotify Top 50. Allowing TikTok to be a door rather than a destination for your career is just one possibility.
3) If you have a song that you want to promote on TikTok, a single cool video isn’t going to help the song go viral. The video itself needs to invite users to recreate their own variations of the video with your song. Think of this as the “Old Town Road” approach in which Lil Nas X started by posting a funny, easy to replicate TikTok of himself turning into a cowboy on the beat drop. The video was a hit and the trend took off on the platform.
The bottom line is you won’t make a lot of money by having your song streaming on TikTok alone. If you want to leverage this explosive new landscape and gain traction, you’ll need to think about how other TikTok users interact with your content.
This information does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice. All information, content, and materials are for general informational purposes only. No reader should act, or refrain from acting, with respect to any particular legal matter on the basis of this information without first seeking legal advice from counsel.