How TikTok is changing the music industry and the way we discover new, popular songs

• TikTok has become a go-to platform for discovering new music.
• Record labels, music marketers, artists, and other creators are all flooding the app with songs.
• Here’s a breakdown of Business Insider’s recent coverage of TikTok’s impact on the music industry.

TikTok is an essential promotional tool for music artists and record labels.

Songs can rise up organically on the app even if they’ve been who have a few hundred thousand followers or up to 10 million fans

As TikTok’s user base has grown and content has become more saturated, marketers are turning more to micro influencers over superstars for song campaigns. 

“The price point for mega stars is extremely high,” Zach Friedman, a cofounder at the upstart record label Homemade Projects, which was acquired by 10K Projects, told BI. “The way the TikTok algorithm works, it’s hard to know what’s going to be successful. Instead of paying a premium for a D’Amelio, you could pay a micro influencer $200, and their TikTok could get 10 million views. Because of this, it’s better to cast a wider net.”

Read more about why some on the app

Hosting private listening parties with TikTok creators

Some artists and labels work with TikTok’s team to host private listening sessions with creators in order to promote a song ahead of its release.

In the summer of 2020, as Miley Cyrus was preparing to release her single “Midnight Sky,” her team partnered with TikTok to schedule two private Zoom calls with around 15 creators to give them an early listen to the track.

“These creators are needed in the process,” Olivia Rudensky, founder and CEO of Fanmade, a marketing and fan engagement upstart that works on digital strategy with clients like Cyrus and Hailey Bieber, told BI. “They’re just as important as all the relevant stops when you’re doing promo or when you’re going to tastemakers because they really are the audience that’s making or breaking music right now.”

Other artists like Khalid, Demi Lovato, and Marshmello have joined similar events. Running a listening session with creators can help an artist’s marketing team understand the types of videos or snippets of a song that might break through on TikTok. 

Read more about TikTok’s private listening sessions

The rise and fall of the TikTok Music streaming app

In July 2023, TikTok stepped deeper into the music business by launching its own dedicated music-streaming app, TikTok Music, in Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, and Singapore.

ByteDance had already piloted an app called Resso in India, Brazil, and Indonesia for a few years. Swapping Resso for a TikTok-branded product may have helped the company better link its main app, known for song discovery, to a full audio-streaming subscription service.

BI tested TikTok Music in Singapore, where it launched in a closed beta, to learn more about how it works. Like TikTok, TikTok Music includes a “For You” feed of recommended content and a variety of social features that set it apart from incumbents like Spotify and Apple Music. The app also has an AI chatbot called Tonik that can help users learn about artists and songs, discover or generate custom playlists, and get news about upcoming concerts within the music app.

Read about TikTok Music’s AI chatbot Tonik and our review of TikTok Music 

But despite efforts to grow TikTok Music in five markets, as well as hints that it might one day come to the US, the company said in September that it planned to shut down the app before the end of the year.

“We will be closing TikTok Music at the end of November in order to focus on our goal of furthering TikTok’s role in driving even greater music listening and value on music streaming services, for the benefit of artists, songwriters and the industry,” Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music business development, told Business Insider in a statement.

Read more about why TikTok Music is shutting down

TikTok threw a live, in-person concert

In December, TikTok stepped deeper into the music business by throwing a live concert in Mesa, Arizona. 

The event, which was also livestreamed on TikTok’s app, sold around 17,000 in-person tickets and cumulatively drew in tens of millions of views via its livestream and replays, per the company. 

Its first big push into live music served as a celebration for its partners and a way to highlight some of the up-and-coming artists that TikTok works with through its artist incubator program, Elevate.

Read more about the live concert, ‘TikTok In The Mix’, here

How streaming and radio have responded to TikTok’s rise

For decades, the radio industry has had to adapt to shifts in how music is consumed, as platforms like MTV, Spotify, and YouTube have changed user habits.

With the arrival of TikTok, many radio stations and their talent have embraced short-form video as both a promotional tool and a resource for discovering new music.

“I wound up on TikTok because I was looking for another way to connect with the listeners of my show, [and] I was looking for a way to expand the listenership of my show,” Jeffrey Ramsay, a former on-air personality at iHeart’s Denver station HITS 95.7, told BI. 

Read more about how radio DJs are using TikTok to find new listeners as the app takes over music discovery

SiriusXM, which streams audio over satellite, digital, and via partnerships with auto manufacturers, took it one step further, launching a dedicated TikTok Radio channel in partnership with the short-video app.

“What we do at SiriusXM is very much a complement to some of the other experiences that are available with music digitally,” Steve Blatter, the senior vice president and general manager of music programming at SiriusXM, told BI.

Read more about SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio, a channel where creators are hosts and memes reach parents and Uber drivers

Streaming apps like Spotify and SoundCloud have also adapted to the TikTok era by introducing their own TikTok-style feeds. Both platforms also offer social tools, including user commenting, which could help them compete with TikTok’s main app and music-streaming platform when it comes to music discovery.

Read more about why TikTok-style feeds are surging in music as streamers like Spotify and SoundCloud battle for young listeners