How the labels behind Mitski and Mac DeMarco navigate TikTok
It was the week of March 17th, 2020. The world was in a frenzy as the coronavirus was shuttering public institutions left and right, and the big news out of the music industry at the time was that streaming numbers on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music were down significantly year-over-year, contrary to many people’s expectations.
However, amidst the sense of overwhelming gloom and doom, Matt Brinkworth, Head of Digital at Omnian Music Group (the company that owns indie labels Captured Tracks and Sinderlyn Records), noticed a curious spike in the streaming numbers for Mac DeMarco’s 2012 song “Freaking Out the Neighborhood.” The Canadian songwriter is one of the most popular indie rock artists of the last decade, so Brinkworth says that it takes a monumental circumstance to move the needle on any of his streaming rates. But this was a staggering 150% increase on a non-single album track from eight years ago, and Brinkworth initially had no idea where it was coming from.
Eventually, Brinkworth and his colleagues confirmed that the traffic was spilling over from TikTok, where the intro riff of “Freaking Out the Neighborhood” was being used for a viral dance craze — a serendipitous revival that so many songs take on nowadays. However, actually tracing the movement back to TikTok was tricky for a couple reasons. At the time, TikTok wasn’t delivering usage reports in the way other platforms like SoundCloud and Spotify do, so Brinkworth wasn’t able to access data that would indicate a song his company owns rights to was being used in thousands of videos on the app. And even if that data was available in the way that it is today (as of a couple months back, says Brinkworth), the clip of “Freaking Out the Neighborhood” that was featured in all of those videos was a user-generated upload of the song that didn’t display the artist or track title anywhere on the file.
Since this was the first instance of an Omnian Music Group artist having a significant moment on TikTok that was translating into serious streaming numbers outside of the app, Brinkworth’s first instinct was to reach out to TikTok’s team and see what they could do to get it properly credited. “The best option that we could come up with … [was] renaming the audio,” Brinkworth tells me. Making it so that users could easily identify the song they were either dancing to themselves or watching other people dance to seemed to help bolster its steady streaming rise.
But given that the track was uploaded to TikTok by a random user who had put a slight phase edit at the beginning — therefore altering and distributing someone else’s intellectual property — TikTok also offered to take the clip down altogether. “And we said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Brinkworth says.
This situation is increasingly becoming a part of day-to-day operations for indie labels in Omnian’s orbit: Noticing that an unofficially distributed song clip from one of their artists is having a viral moment on TikTok, seeing the sometimes-stunning streaming bump on other DSPs and then deciding how to milk that trend rather than squash it.
In fact, it wasn’t until recently that TikTok had even been taken seriously in the indie rock sphere in the first place. For most of the past few years, the teen-dominated app seemed like a space mainly for hip-hop and pop artists to thrive (given the dance format of the app, and the biggest stars being pop-rappers like Lil Nas X and bbno$), and for major labels to swoop in with deals.
It was only at the top of this year — as TikTok firmly established itself in the wider fabric of social media and pop culture, and as older audiences hopped on board — that the app presented itself as more useful for indie rock labels. Phil Waldorf, Co-Founder and Head of Global Marketing at Secretly Group (the company that owns the labels Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar and Secretly Canadian), tells me that TikTok has been a distinctly 2020 interest to him and his team. For a while, seeing a few thousand TikTok videos for artists of theirs like Phoebe Bridgers and Khruangbin wasn’t really making any unusual dent in their catalog performance on other DSPs. However, once a deep cut in Bon Iver’s discography, “Rosyln” — which was featured on the 2009 Twilight soundtrack — started blowing up on Spotify, his interest was piqued.
“All of the sudden that song is streaming more than ‘Skinny Love’ and you’re just like, ‘What?’” Waldorf tells me with disbelief. Waldorf then saw Dead Oceans artist Mitski’s song “Me and My Husband” — an album track that was never pushed as a single — go from roughly 100,000 streams a month to 100,000 streams a day, thanks to a separate TikTok trend.
Many other examples abound in the indie rock world today. The second most-streamed song on Spotify by the band The Front Bottoms is a 2014 deep cut called “Be Nice to Me,” which, thanks to being featured in over 47,000 TikTok videos through an unofficial clip, is currently dwarfing every song from the band’s brand new record. The most popular song on Spotify for indie-rock legends Pavement is a 1997 B-side called “Harness Your Hopes,” an unofficial, uncredited clip of which is currently included in over 20,000 videos on TikTok.
“The only thing I’ve ever seen move streams as much as a TikTok viral dance has been a Netflix sync,” Brinkworth says. “Like, a big Netflix sync.”
The anti-marketing marketing plan
While TikTok may be proving itself as a viable platform for indie artists, it’s crucial to underscore how arbitrary and unpredictable these instances of success are.
A common refrain among all of the sources for this story: Outside of straight-up paying for influencers to share your song, how do you market music on an app that’s entirely premised on users creating their own content? How do you try to engineer success on a platform with no linear or scientific path to virality — a space with no hunger for corporate content (i.e. underground labels and artists starting their own promotional accounts), no cultural loyalty to songs that are popular or new and even an aversion (conscious or not) to the ever-shortening lifecycle of a song’s “relevance” within traditional industry structures like charts and press coverage?
One near-universal agreement about TikTok is that in terms of the popularity of a given song, all of the power is in the hands of its users (and of TikTok’s algorithm). From the label’s perspective, trying to impose a song’s popularity top-down is often futile. Even though labels are technically able to choose which 15-second portion of the track they want to display on TikTok, there’s no way of knowing which portion of a song users will want to gravitate toward in the first place. Moreover, on an app that’s all about customization and editing songs to fit the distinct needs of a given video, choosing the “right” section of a song is a total gamble and not one-size-fits-all.
For instance, the portion of DeMarco’s “Freaking Out The Neighborhood” that was used in all those videos on TikTok was completely counterintuitive to what Brinkworth would assume are the main draws of the song. “If I had asked you, ‘Guess which part of ‘Freaking Out The Neighborhood’ kids would make a dance to?’ it wouldn’t just be the intro guitar riff,” Brinkworth says. “Although it is an incredible riff, our minds tend to go toward hooks and vocals and specific lyrics that people could mime to or something. So that was an interesting thing to notice.”
Therefore, the TikTok strategy for an indie artist’s team is much more reactive than active, which is quite different from traditional marketing strategies like releasing singles based on an estimation of their appeal, placing songs on playlists and facilitating press. “It used to be that people maybe fell in love with a song or fell in love with an album, and now they might fall in love with a meme,” Waldorf says. “I think [TikTok’s] pure uniqueness and authenticity and the fact that it is a little bit wild west is kind of what’s thrilling about it.”
That said, there is still some connection between these “old” and “new” worlds of marketing. For instance, Waldorf is in close contact with DSP partners so that songs that spike on TikTok are being put into Spotify playlists accordingly, whether that be themed playlists or an Artist’s “best of” playlist. And because the nature of TikTok makes it ripe for rapid-fire experimentation and testing around the popularity of a given track, success on the app can help give artists more leverage in standard business negotiations.
Chris Crowley, a manager at Salty Artist Management, oversaw one of the earliest TikTok successes within the indie realm: The song “Prom Queen” by the Chicago indie-pop band Beach Bunny, which had its viral moment in the spring of 2019. The self-released song was months old at that point, and the band — then a regional college project — wasn’t even spending time promoting the song themselves, let alone on TikTok.
The subsequent viral traction became a valuable asset for shopping the record around to both indie and major labels. Beach Bunny’s contemporaries who make relatively similar lo-fi rock music might have a few songs on Spotify in the range of 1 million to 5 million streams, but “Prom Queen” was in the tens of millions thanks to TikTok. “When you have something happening like that [TikTok virality], it really helps with your bargaining power,” Crowley tells me. “I found that people were more willing to offer better terms and reversions.”
A surprisingly laissez-faire approach to royalties
Cultural alignment aside, another major reason why indie labels weren’t giving TikTok the time of day before this year was that there was very little money to be made on it until January 2020. That’s when the licensing giant Merlin — a megaforce in the indie licensing world — signed a contract with TikTok, which was the first major deal between TikTok and a digital rights agency. The deal marked the beginning of quarterly royalty payouts, akin to other streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
The actual way of calculating payments is unique to TikTok: Rather than paying out royalties for a TikTok video on a per-view basis, royalties are tallied up based on how many total videos are created on the app with an officially distributed song clip. So even if 80,000 people “like” or view a single video with a given song in it, that only amounts to a fraction of a penny’s worth of payouts because it’s just one video. A song really has to generate other videos, from other users on the app, in order for it to start paying in any meaningful way, which is a totally different mechanic from those of other streaming services.
Collecting those royalties can also be extremely challenging — both because the app is so focused on user-generated content, and because their royalty system is so new. As it stands, TikTok only delivers usage reporting (i.e. royalties and payout data) on content that’s been professionally uploaded through a distributor. While the actual process of delivering the audio is the same as distributing to a standard DSP like Spotify, rights holders don’t have a visual articulation of the data natively within TikTok as they otherwise would with dashboards like Spotify For Artists or Apple Music For Artists. And even if a song picks up traction on TikTok, the rights holders won’t generate any money directly if the clip was uploaded unofficially from an outside user, like what happened with the Mac DeMarco situation.
(To make things even more confusing: TikTok’s payouts for music royalties is calculated separately from the app’s payouts to influencers and creators in general, which is managed through their $200 million Creator Fund rather than through licensing deals. The Creator Fund pays out creators more on a per-view rather than per-video basis, and the reported payout rates are abysmal — around $0.00002 per view, or just 1/100th of the low end of what Spotify pays rights holders, according to Tubefilter. Exact royalty rates for official music on TikTok are difficult to come by, and few people in the industry are willing to talk about it publicly.)
One might think that if an unofficially uploaded song is taking off on TikTok, it might be better to drive users to an official, credited and monetized version of the same clip instead. But in reality, there’s often no incentive for users to choose the official version, especially if the unofficial upload has an edit that makes it special and appealing for a particular kind of challenge (whether that be a vocal or an instrumental effect, like the common “slowed & reverb” edit).
For example, another track from the aforementioned Mitski that has recently gone viral on TikTok is “Strawberry Blond,” which was part of her self-released 2013 album and saw a huge spike in DSP streams over the summer, going from 15,000 to 90,000 streams per day on Spotify. As of this writing, there are nearly 71,000 videos using an unofficial upload of “Strawberry Blond” on TikTok, compared to under 4,000 videos using the officially distributed clip.
“Obviously I’d love for people to use the official clips,” Crowley, who also manages Mitski, tells me. “But in some sense, it can be a necessary evil if it means you’re still getting the astronomical traction translating to other DSPs.”
This is why getting unofficially uploaded songs credited properly is so important: The name of the game is leading people off the app to other platforms where payouts are more consistent. And to TikTok’s credit, the app is taking some steps to label unofficial uploads properly — whether in adding a bracket at the bottom of videos with the caption “Contains x by x artist,” or by adding a button below the audio’s credit page that links out to Apple Music to hear the track in full.
From a business perspective, taking down bootlegs of copyrighted content seems like the ideal move. But in the world of TikTok, labels are generally more interested in the external benefits of its popularity than in chasing royalties and managing legal technicalities within TikTok itself — and the promotional capabilities of the app are proving so successful that indie labels are often encouraging what could be described as copyright infringement. Multiple sources tell me that this approach echoes the “look-the-other-way” philosophy many indie labels took during the MP3 piracy explosion in the 2000s, then with YouTube and SoundCloud in the 2010s (e.g. digital sales were down, but merch and/or concert tickets were often positively affected).
That said, some fear that if TikTok doesn’t figure out how to pay out royalties for unofficial uploads of licensed songs, the company might face serious obstacles from major labels that could potentially kneecap what presently makes the app so magical and conducive to indie labels, especially in terms of leveling the playing field of virality and commercial impact.
“One thing I like about platforms like TikTok is the creativity of fans,” says Brinkworth. “And I do worry that if they don’t figure out the paying on user-generated content that we might have a similar situation like we do with SoundCloud, in which the major labels enforce serious licensing restrictions, causing them to figure out how to monetize quickly. And ultimately losing what made it special at the beginning.”