TikTok seems like the place to be, especially for younger audiences. In reality, the demographics of TikTok users are changing and nowadays many different age groups are present on TikTok, with around 700 million users watching over one billion videos every day. Many of those videos include music. This is your chance to use the popularity of this platform to promote your music. You now have the possibility to distribute your tracks to TikTok via MusicHub.

This article will provide you with an overview and some tips on how to successfully make your music available on TikTok.

What is TikTok?

First of all, TikTok works in a different way than streaming and download platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. TikTok is not a DSP (digital service provider) where people choose to consume certain music. It is actually a short video platform. On the platform, users can create short videos (currently up to 60 seconds, but TikTok is testing longer formats as well) to entertain and engage other users. This could be anything: from dance videos and lip synching, to cat content or comedy videos. TikTok has become extremely popular in the last few years, and quite a few musicians have gone viral and been discovered thanks to gaining popularity on it. You may not want to become a TikTok influencer, but you can still exploit TikTok’s potential to get your music heard.

When creating a video, users can either use their own video sound (the audio which comes with the video recording) or a different sound which has been created by someone else, or was distributed to TikTok on behalf of an artist (e.g. via MusicHub). Music is widely used for all different kinds of TikTok videos, such as dance videos, or just to convey a certain mood present in a video/support a story, e.g. with lyrical content. Therefore, you may also want to take part in the TikTok game and distribute your music to the platform via MusicHub.

As most videos are quite short, your music is not distributed as a whole track or album to TikTok, but you provide snippets of your tracks for users to place in the background of their videos. The maximum snippet length is 60 seconds, but TikTok creators can also use a shorter sequence of your music for their videos (e.g. 15 seconds). They can still decide how much of the snippet they use, depending on the length of their videos, and trim it to the part and length they like.

Although just a snippet of your tracks is distributed to TikTok, on MusicHub you don’t have to create a separate release just for TikTok. You simply have to add a few more details to your release when choosing TikTok as a platform to distribute your music to.

When creating your release on MusicHub, there are two ways to add the specific times of your snippet. In both ways, you will be able to add a track preview time to each track you want to get on TikTok. Firstly, this track preview time will be the snippet used for distribution to TikTok, and secondly, as a preview of your track on iTunes. You can enter a specific time code you want to deliver, e.g. 00:00 to 01:00 (default), or customised, e.g. 0:53 to 01:53 – depending on which part you think is most expressive and likely to be used by TikTok users in their videos.

In step 3 “tracklist”, you will be able to upload your tracks and then, as part of your track details, you can choose the snippet by adding a “Track preview start time”.

You can do the same if you upload your tracks on the “Tracks page”. Here, you’ll even have the possibility to listen to your track again directly in MusicHub, in order to choose the snippet wisely.

Tip: As many people, and especially TikTok users, have a short attention span, you should choose your snippet so that the first seconds of it are unique and recognisable. Users tend to create shorter videos, for instance with 15 seconds rather than 60 seconds. As they anyways listen to your 60 seconds snippet from the start, even if they plan to trim it, you want to pay special attention to the first 15 seconds as well and make sure to hook users on your music when they first listen to it. You can put the focus on a catchy text or melody. You may also want to pay attention to the bpm rate because faster parts are mostly more catchy and recognisable than slower parts.

In step 4 (Distribution) of your release on MusicHub, you will be able to choose TikTok as a platform to distribute your music to. By default, all platforms are already pre-selected. You can of course deselect TikTok (and/or any other platforms) if you don’t want to distribute your music to this platform.

Note: If you haven’t defined the snippet / track preview time before reviewing your release, it will automatically stay at the default of 00:00 to 01:00. You will be notified of this at the review stage (step 5 of your release) and will still be able to adjust it if desired.

Note: At the moment, we can only distribute new releases to TikTok, so you cannot distribute your past releases only for TikTok again via MusicHub. We are working on making this available for you in the future and will let you know as soon as it’s live.

After your music snippet has been distributed to TikTok, anyone can search for it in the sound library. You can access the sound library when you start creating a video. For this, just click the plus sign at the bottom of the start screen, then click “Add sound” at the top and the sound library will appear. There, users can search for specific artists or titles, but also get recommendations, look for playlists, trending artist, songs or genres.

If you’d like to create a video with your own music (which is a good strategy to promote your music), make sure that you use the official sound (the snippet) distributed to TikTok via MusicHub. You will recognise your music by your artist name. If it is not the official sound, you will notice that a different user name is shown, which is not your artist name. Only official sounds distributed to TikTok via MusicHub can be monetised when they are used. When someone else creates a separate sound with your music and this is subsequently used in a video, you will not get paid. If that happens, you may want to report this non-original sound to TikTok and ask them to merge the unauthorised sound with your original sound. Note: this is only possible when your original sound has been used in more than 1,000 videos.