The biggest misconceptions about TikTok music marketing

On any given day, it is impossible to look at the Spotify Charts without seeing a dozen records that originated from TikTok. Every day a new song goes viral on the latter platform, and ends up accumulating millions of streams on the former in a matter of weeks or even days.

What’s even more fascinating is that many of the biggest hits in the last two years — at least measured by Billboard chart placement — were a direct result of going viral on TikTok.  Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” broke records in 2019 as the longest-leading No. 1 hit in Billboard Hot 100 history, with TikTok fueling the fire. One year later, DaBaby’s song “Rockstar” (ft. Roddy Ricch) now soundtracks nearly 8 million user-generated videos on TikTok, and  has been crowned the top contender for “song of the summer” in 2020 by Spotify, Billboard, The Wall Street Journal and U.K.-based Official Charts.

Off the backs of these successes, countless record labels and music marketing companies are including TikTok as one of their top marketing priorities for past, present and future releases. But to be realistic, it is still difficult to gain real traction on TikTok, in a world where manufacturing virality often feels like playing the lottery. Users have short attention spans, and although the audio is always displayed in the bottom right-hand corner of each video, it is unlikely that users will look at the song while they are focused on the funny video and scrolling through their “For You” feed for entertainment purposes. Discovering a new great song is simply a byproduct of this viewing experience, and TikTok users usually share content because of the video and not because of the song itself.

Underpinning these challenges lie two major misconceptions in the music industry about the forces that actually drive successful music campaigns on TikTok and beyond:

1. TikTok is the new radio — in the slow way, too

The first major area where many record labels and artist managers fail with TikTok is that they are actually not patient enough.

Given the viral nature of TikTok, one might assume that if a label runs an influencer campaign around a track, it will hit Spotify’s Viral Charts within a matter of days. This is wrong. In practice, the power of TikTok is like a new take on terrestrial radio or MTV in terms of maximizing awareness. And just like how it takes a song up to six months worth of spins on top-40 radio to build up audience familiarity over time and hit its peak at number one, it often takes weeks to see how a record that goes viral on TikTok then reacts, matures and sustains itself on DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music. It is important that labels and management teams are just as patient with TikTok as they are with radio and other music-promotion channels.

Let’s dive into a few case studies, starting with DaBaby’s “Rockstar.” As mentioned above, several publications have suggested that “Rockstar” is the top contender for song of the summer in 2020, due to its Billboard chart performance. But it’s important to keep in mind that that record took time to grow on TikTok.

If we analyze the growth of “Rockstar” from its release in April 2020, we see that the song had 400,000+ user-generated videos created on TikTok one month before it peaked at No. 1 on the Spotify Global 200 on May 26th, 2020, according to data on Chartmetric. The music video for “Rockstar,” which has nearly 95 million views as of press time, was not released until exactly one month after that Spotify peak — suggesting a strategy of building up momentum through smart sequencing of key content drops, rather than front-loading the campaign all at once.

“Supalonely (ft. Gus Dapperton)” by BENEE is another example of a song growing on TikTok — although the circumstances are quite different from “Rockstar,” as “Supalonely” had already been out for five months before it started gaining more traction on the app in March 2020, thanks to viral videos from Charli D’Amelio and Emma Chamberlain. That same month, Republic Records did an incredible job reacting to the song’s performance, pushing it on various other platforms including contemporary hit radio in the U.S. and U.K. This marked a tipping point for the record — but as you can see in the chart below, “Supalonely” still did not hit its peak on TikTok until June 2020, even with terrestrial radio placements to back it up.

2. Viral distribution alone isn’t enough

Music companies need to rethink timing when it comes to reacting to a song on TikTok. Under more traditional models, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that a song becomes irrelevant after six months on the market. In reality, TikTok breaks these rules: Whether a song is a few days, years or decades old, it has a chance to do well on the platform (Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” being a quintessential example).

Moreover, while influencers like Charli D’amelio, Addison Rae and Emma Chamberlain can definitely help move the needle on streaming, forcing a song’s exposure through influencer payments is not enough to guarantee success. Viral music campaigns that truly make an impact need good distribution and good creative. If you can creatively tell a story that Gen-Z will relate to on an emotional level, you can do well on the platform regardless of what kinds of songs you’re working with.

On the flip side, there are many examples of songs that have thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of UGC videos created around them on TikTok, but that are not seeing subsequent movement and momentum on digital streaming platforms.

For example, “I Got You” by Bazzi has over 74,000 UGC videos created on TikTok and an estimated 130+ million views across all videos created, including one from avani, one of TikTok’s biggest stars. But according to Chartmetric, the song has appeared on only four regional Spotify Top 200 charts (in Taiwan, Malaysia, Norway and Singapore) — all in the same week in April 2020 — and has not appeared once in Spotify’s Viral 50 chart. Why has this not translated to streaming, even though it’s a great song by a well-known artist that was pushed by great influencers?

This might sound counterintuitive, but I believe the underperformance of this song on streaming is because the creative for the TikTok challenge was defaulted just to a dance. Although dancing can be an effective virality driver on TikTok due to its simplicity for everyday users to replicate, many dances still lack a certain uniqueness from one another. Influencers and creators can also tell when a song is being promoted inorganically versus trending more organically within their communities.

In contrast, two songs that are both doing well on TikTok and showing subsequent traction on DSPs are “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and “Upside Down” by Jvke. Yes, these songs come from two fundamentally different generations, and the viral videos behind them came from different contexts (i.e. the viral “Dreams” video was made by an everyday person who wasn’t part of Fleetwood Mac, while the viral “Upside Down” video was made by the artist himself).

But the videos both followed the approach of combining great music with smart, original visuals. Moreover, in each of those videos, the song itself was the main focus and drove the core creative direction. In Jvke’s viral video, he is producing the track “Upside Down” in real time with his mom, and in Nathan Apodaca’s video, he is lip-syncing the lyrics to “Dreams” while drinking out of a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. If these videos used a different song, it would have been a completely different style.

That is why it is important for marketing teams to execute content that is tailored for the platform, and to not try and force a dance challenge just because it worked on another song.

And even if you don’t achieve virality, that doesn’t mean TikTok isn’t valuable for testing creative ways to market music in a rigorous yet inexpensive way. In particular, TikTok allows labels and marketers to A/B test records, or even specific earworms within records, by going direct to the consumer and measuring feedback and fan sentiment in real time based on the type of videos that everyday people make. People will dance, cry and even divorce their spouses to a track in the background on the platform; these everyday, relatable and highly emotional experiences can be the spark for a song breaking through to larger audiences or gaining a new life after years of dormancy. You can almost think of it almost like a brilliant sync placement in a Netflix movie (indeed, this is how many label marketers already think about the value of TikTok).

TikTok has elevated the decades-old concept of powerful audiovisual experiences breaking new music and new artists, and has allowed for more transparency than ever before around how audiences relate to a record at scale. When a TikTok user loves a song, they go beyond just commenting and create a video that has the potential to gain millions of views on the app. This is why it is an exciting time to market music on TikTok — but amidst all the hype, it’s important to check our assumptions about the mechanics of virality and actually study the data behind industry success stories.

The above examples demonstrate that, like anything with cultural impact, real impact on TikTok doesn’t just come from “authentic” content or an influencer marketing budget. It also comes from outside-the-box thinking — and, most importantly, from time.