How TikTok is changing the music industry

• TikTok has become a go-to platform for discovering new music.
• Record labels, music marketers, artists, and other creators are all flooding the app with songs.
• Here's a full breakdown of Insider's recent coverage on TikTok's impact on the music industry.

TikTok is an essential promotional tool for music artists and record labels.

Songs can rise up organically on the app even if they've been outside the mainstream for decades. Marketers can also hire influencers to help a song take off, sparking a wave of user-generated posts from their fans. And some artists even set up private listening sessions with TikTok influencers in the hope that it will help new songs gain steam on the app.

The company has a global team that works with artists and record labels, negotiates licensing deals with rights holders, and builds new ways for TikTok to convert its cultural influence into recurring revenue. The company launched in March a song-distribution platform called SoundOn, and may eventually roll out its own music streaming service, a trademark filing from its parent company ByteDance suggests.

"TikTok has really become a critical part of artist storytelling," Kristen Bender, SVP of digital strategy and business development at Universal Music Group, told Insider during a 2021 webinar on TikTok's impact on the music industry. "Our labels have been extremely leaned into the platform."

Watch a full replay of Insider's webinar on TikTok's impact on the music industry, featuring execs from TikTok, Universal Music Group, and UnitedMasters

For some, the hyper-focus on TikTok can be draining. Artists like Halsey and Charli XCX have recently posted videos expressing frustration at being asked to make TikToks by their labels. One performer, the artist Taylor Upsahl, told Insider it can be "really stressful" to be expected to balance social promotion with touring and writing and recording new music.

And for record labels and other rights holders, TikTok's impact on music can be frustrating, particularly when the company asserts its influence as leverage during licensing negotiations.

"The argument from the labels' position is that TikTok wouldn't have an app without music because that's what people are primarily using in their videos," Tatiana Cirisano, a music industry analyst and consultant at the research firm MIDiA Research, told Insider. "The argument from TikTok's side is TikTok is now so important to the music industry that they can't afford to not have their music on the platform."

Read more about the 'complicated' and codependent relationship between TikTok and music rights holders

But the industry's attention on TikTok isn't unfounded. Songs that trend on TikTok often end up charting on the Billboard 100 or Spotify Viral 50. And 67% of the app's users are more likely to seek out songs on music-streaming services after hearing them on TikTok, according to a November 2021 study conducted for TikTok by the music-analytics company MRC Data.

TikTok has become a hub for labels to promote both new releases and back catalog tracks. And a new cohort of social-media music marketers has sprung up to support promotional efforts on the app.

Check out Insider's power list of the 23 music marketers, artists, digital creators, record labels, and other industry insiders who are using TikTok to help define popular music

The blending of short-form video with music has spread well beyond TikTok onto other apps like Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram. YouTube's top music exec Lyor Cohen told GQ that short-form video is one of his biggest focuses when it comes to the company's music strategy.

"Every short-format platform's got music on it now," Ted Suh, global head of music partnerships at Snap Inc., told Insider. "All this engagement on these types of services is really leading to the music industry finding incremental business value, whether it's leveraging this data to help them get radio play, or more spins on Pandora, to even kicking off national tours."

Read Insider's list of 15 music innovators at TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms who are shaping the future of the industry on social media

Paying creators to promote songs on TikTok

Song promo deals between music marketers and influencers have become an important source of income for TikTok creators. Some users can earn hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single video where they promote an artist's track.

"Music marketing on TikTok is huge," Jesse Callahan, founder of the upstart marketing firm Montford Agency, told Insider. "It's a big way that labels have brought artists into the spotlight the last couple of years. It's also a big way that creators have made a lot of money."

Read more about the different rates for song promos for TikTok creators who have a few hundred thousand followers or up to 10 millions fans

Hiring micro influencers for song campaigns

As TikTok's user base has grown and content has become more saturated, marketers are turning more to micro influencers over superstars for song campaigns.

"The price point for mega stars is extremely high," Zach Friedman, a cofounder at the upstart record label Homemade Projects, told Insider. "The way the TikTok algorithm works, it's hard to know what's going to be successful. Instead of paying a premium for a D'Amelio, you could pay a micro influencer $200 and their TikTok could get 10 million views. Because of this, it's better to cast a wider net."

Read more about why some marketers are choosing micro influencers to promote new tracks

Working with non-influencer accounts on song campaigns

While the strategy of hiring influencers to spark a music trend is tried-and-true, record labels also regularly pay general-interest accounts to put songs in the background of videos.

Working with a non-influencer account, like a creator who uploads close-up shots of slime or films a hydraulic press crushing random objects, can be an equally effective way to drive interest in a song, music marketers told Insider.

"Using these accounts like the hydraulic press accounts are helpful with giving the song a chance to sort of work outwards first, and just kind of get in front of people and make the algorithm aware of it," Acrophase Records' founder Dan Asip told Insider.

Read about why TikTok music marketers are turning to general-interest accounts to promote songs

Creating TikTok music challenges to spark user-generated videos

And some marketers are opening the door for social-media users who wouldn't traditionally be considered influencers to get paid to promote music.

Platforms like Pearpop and Preffy allow labels and artists to create user-generated video challenges that invite users with any size following to get paid on a sliding scale for participating in a song or artist campaign.

"The initial way influencer marketing would work would be you would go and pay a few people with big followings, but it would be like throwing a few big logs onto a non-existent fire," Pearpop cofounder Cole Mason told Insider. "With challenges, there's a way to actually start the fire."

Read more about how music marketers are using a new TikTok strategy to make song 'challenges' go viral

How record labels track performance on TikTok

Many record labels have teams dedicated to monitoring TikTok so they can help fan the flames on a trending song when it starts to take off.

"Our entire music catalog is effectively tracked on a daily basis," said Andy McGrath, the senior vice president of marketing at Legacy Recordings, a division within Sony Music focused on the label's catalog of songs dating back decades. "We're constantly monitoring actions, reactions, and trends that happen on TikTok."

Read more about how Sony's marketing team jumps into action when an old song begins to trend

RCA Records' SVP of digital marketing Tarek Al-Hamdouni said the label relies on a series of signals like an increase in streams on Spotify or shifts in audience numbers on YouTube to track the efficacy of a TikTok song campaign.

"If I see that in the course of a week our audience [on YouTube] went from being primarily 25- to 34-year-old male and a week later the majority is 13-to-24 female, then that's a pretty easy bridge to connect between those two platforms," Al-Hamdouni told Insider.

Read more about RCA Records' strategy for promoting songs on TikTok

Writing songs specifically for TikTok

While TikTok is often a go-to platform for promoting a newly released track, some artists incorporate the app even earlier in their creative process.

The Canadian rapper Tiagz (Tiago Garcia-Arenas) built a following of 4.2 million fans on the app by writing songs that directly referenced the app's popular memes and trends, effectively gaming its search and content recommendation algorithms.

"I tried to understand the platform," Tiagz told Insider. "I kept doing these memes because I saw that it worked."

Read more about how Tiagz used TikTok to land a record deal with Epic Records

Remixes and mashups

Remixes are wildly popular on TikTok.

Whether sped up, slowed down, layered with a clap track, or mashed up with another track, songs are constantly being remixed on the app.

"A song can have an entirely different sentiment, application, audience, everything when it is remixed, which really just provides it an entirely new life," Jacquelyn Schwartz, music partnerships director at the marketing agency Creed Media, said.

To tap into the trend, record labels and marketers are collaborating with remix and mashup artists as part of their song release strategies on TikTok. The tactic expands on what artists have long done to get their songs in front of a wider audience.

"Back in the day, you'd go get a bunch of club DJs to remix your records so that you could appeal to the drum-and-bass market, to the techno market, to the underground market," said Nima Nasseri, the A&R lead for UMG's music strategy and tactics team. "You want to be able to have your record get discovered in spaces that it normally wouldn't be discovered in."

Read more about the growing business behind TikTok song remixes, which are transforming the way music is discovered on the app

TikTok fatigue among artists is rising

Not all performers are thrilled about spending time on TikTok.

The app's grip on the music industry has led some artists to speak out about the pressure they feel to be content creators.

"TikTok has now become a whole other part of our job that takes up such a significant amount of time," performer Taylor Upsahl told Insider. "As artists, we're all still in a transitional phase of like, 'Okay, cool, how do we find time and energy to now be essentially content creators and influencers?'"

Read more about how TikTok's influence on music is exhausting artists and marketers alike as the industry grapples with the pressure to go viral

Inside TikTok's internal music division

Not all song trends on TikTok happen serendipitously or via external music marketing campaigns.

TikTok also has an internal music division dedicated to monitoring music trends on the app. Led by former Warner Music digital chief Ole Obermann, the company's music team handles artist and record label relations, licensing deals, and newer products such as SoundOn and Resso.

Insider mapped out the 25 execs and staffers at TikTok and its parent company ByteDance who are driving music strategy

TikTok's music operations team has a series of "promo levers" that it uses to boost the popularity of songs. The company can add new tracks to playlists in the "Sounds" section of its app and apply keywords on the back end to optimize song discoverability in the app's search interface.

Read more about how TikTok's music team shapes trends on the app

Hosting private listening parties with TikTok creators

Some artists and labels work with TikTok's team to host private listening sessions with creators in order to promote a song ahead of its release.

In the summer of 2020, as Miley Cyrus was preparing to release her single "Midnight Sky," her team partnered with TikTok to schedule two private Zoom calls with around 15 creators to give them an early listen to the track.

"These creators are needed in the process," Olivia Rudensky, founder and CEO of Fanmade, a marketing and fan engagement upstart that works on digital strategy with clients like Cyrus and Hailey Bieber, told Insider. "They're just as important as all the relevant stops when you're doing promo or when you're going to tastemakers because they really are the audience that's making or breaking music right now."

Other artists like Khalid, Demi Lovato, and Marshmellow have joined similar events. Running a listening session with creators can help an artist's marketing team understand the types of videos or snippets of a song that might break through on TikTok.

Read more about TikTok's private listening sessions

How the radio industry is responding to TikTok's rise

For decades, the radio industry has had to adapt to shifts in how music is consumed, as platforms like MTV, Spotify, and YouTube have changed user habits.

With the arrival of TikTok, many radio stations and their talent have embraced short-form video as both a promotional tool and a resource for discovering new music.

"I wound up on TikTok because I was looking for another way to connect with the listeners of my show, [and] I was looking for a way to expand the listenership of my show," Jeffrey Ramsay, an on-air personality at iHeart's Denver, Colorado, station HITS 95.7, told Insider.

Read more about how radio DJs are using TikTok to find new listeners as the app takes over music discovery

SiriusXM, which streams audio over satellite, digital, and via partnerships with auto manufacturers, took it one step further, launching a dedicated TikTok Radio channel in partnership with the short-video app.

"What we do at SiriusXM is very much a complement to some of the other experiences that are available with music digitally," Steve Blatter, the senior vice president and general manager of music programming at SiriusXM, told Insider.

Read more about SiriusXM's TikTok Radio, a channel where creators are hosts and memes reach parents and Uber drivers