“TikTok has opened up this door where anything’s at play. All old records, all new records — people don’t care on TikTok as long as it’s fun to make content with.”
– Adi Azran, head of marketing at the TikTok-focused media company Flighthouse,
Excerpt via Business Insider
TikTok has become a hit maker in the music industry.
The app’s music-friendly interface and its users’ penchant for dance challenges have made TikTok a key promotional tool for artists and record labels alike. One need look no further than the Billboard 100 or Spotify Viral 50 to see the app’s imprint on popular music in recent months.
Songs can take off on TikTok by accident, as with the sudden surge in popularity of Matthew Wilder’s 1983 hit “Break My Stride” earlier this year. In other instances, marketers or artists try to make songs trend by tapping into existing TikTok fads, creating original songs, or adapting tracks for TikTok’s short-video format and hiring influencers to promote them.
For more stories on how record labels, artists, and marketers are taking advantage of music trends on TikTok, check out these other posts:
- A Sony Music exec explains the label’s TikTok strategy and how it responds when a song like ‘Break My Stride’ catches fire: Business Insider spoke with the marketing team at Sony Music’s Legacy Recordings to learn about its strategy for promoting trending songs on TikTok.
- The agency behind one of TikTok’s top ad campaigns says brands can build a massive audience through original music and dance trends but the ‘window is closing quickly’: Business Insider spoke with the cofounders of Movers and Shakers to learn more about their TikTok strategy and how brands fit into the app’s future.
- Music artist Tiagz explains how he mastered TikTok’s algorithm to score a major record deal, with help from Charli D’Amelio and a 1950s jazz classic: The Canadian rapper Tiagz (Tiago Garcia-Arenas) has built a career as a producer by strategically uploading songs to the short-form video app TikTok.
