How To Blow Up On TikTok With Music
Want to Make Your Music Blow Up on TikTok? Here Are 7 Proven Tips
Many artists, including quick-rising creators and established acts alike, have enjoyed substantial commercial success as a result of viral TikTok trends. But what’s the secret to blowing your music up on TikTok?
WMR Media cut its teeth on Spotify playlists, once the most important battleground for growing your music. But that was before TikTok exploded, and WMR Music Group started diversifying accordingly to help artists grow their careers on the short-form video app. Now that TikTok looks like it’s here to stay in the U.S., WMR Music Group joined forces with Digital Music News to distill the best pro tips for making your music blow up on this fast-growing platform. Enjoy.
1. Nail the Sound Clip
Nailing the sound clip – the 15-second to 60-second segment that plays when creators select a song – is imperative. The majority of TikTok videos are 10-15 seconds in length (and feature 10-15 seconds of music), but distributors typically set songs’ sound clips as their first 15, 30, or 60 seconds by default.
This is the foremost impediment to promotional achievements on the service, as the sound clip should showcase the catchiest 15 seconds of the track at hand. The sound clips for “Old Town Road,” “Supalonely,” and “Dreams,” for instance, present the tracks’ most memorable (and TikTok-suited) elements.
You can customize your TikTok snippets through your distributor or by manually uploading a video.
2. Become an Active TikTok Creator
For musicians, being personally active on TikTok is an important component of building meaningful relationships with users and music fans.
Regularly creating content will enable you to determine what works in videos – and the types of content that users like most – while bolstering your following. Plus, commenting on viral videos with your music is a quick and engaging way to attract additional followers yet.
Followers, in turn, can help you to launch campaigns and capitalize on trend-related opportunities.
3. Make a Point of Enjoying Content as a Fan
Frequently enjoying other TikTok users’ videos, with an emphasis on learning from their technical characteristics, is also a worthwhile habit.
Then, you can effectively reverse engineer the videos and the strategies of today’s leading TikTok voices.
4. Stick to Straightforward Video Concepts That Are Easy (and Fun) to Replicate
Implementing straightforward video concepts is another key ingredient in the recipe for music-promotion success on TikTok. For obvious reasons, accessible trends reach a larger number of fans than niche concepts. Concepts that are fun and easy to replicate make it easier for your song to spread.
5. Supplement Top-Performing Videos by Sharing the Best Fan Renditions Across Social Media
Sharing the best fan renditions of your top-performing TikTok videos across all of social media is a great way to amplify promotional effectiveness. Many of the resulting viewers will craft their own clips featuring your music — helping to keep the trend and the fan interest going.
“The holy grail is for the music to spill into streaming and into fan-base building,”
6. Understand and Adapt to the Basics of TikTok’s Algorithm
Understanding and adapting to the basics of TikTok’s algorithm is a must. In brief, the portion of users that watch a video from beginning to end — and, better yet, multiple times — is more significant than likes, comments, and shares.
It’s the completion rate that TikTok analyzes when deciding whether to plug emerging clips on users’ For You pages. Consequently, inherently interesting content is positioned to succeed from the outset.
7. Practice and Identify What Works Best for You and Your Followers
While marketing your music on TikTok, it’s important to bear in mind that there are north of 800 million users and many more videos than that on the three-year-old service.
Given this immense volume of users and content, riding trends to new career heights is in many ways a long game. Practice, including determining what works best for you and your followers, is therefore invaluable.