Music Marketing on Social Media
In the last year, people’s attention spans have drastically shortened, largely due to the pandemic as well as the rising popularity of a number of social media platforms. Having people around the world stay at home and spend most of their free time scrolling down the social media apps on their phones has resulted in incredible changes when it comes to marketing on social media platforms in general, and especially with music.
The social media app TikTok has managed to completely change the approach to music marketing in the last year, and away from the one that’s been around for decades. Plenty of music marketing experts have weighed in on the strategies, and one of the things that they haven’t been able to pinpoint yet is whether a song will skyrocket in popularity using the platform. This is because it’s not easy to predict the platform’s algorithm, and learn which things are going to be popular the next day or month.
Most of the time, music streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music have been the leaders of introducing the latest hit songs to the global population. However, TikTok has proven to be a completely different platform, as the common pop hits played on it don’t have the same popularity as some other, unknown songs by unknown artists.
One great example of this is the content creator and musician Nathan Evans, who got signed with a big record label because of his viral hits on the platform. He ended up recording himself singing a popular 19th-century song that went viral and led to him receiving a string of big media placements and TV appearances.
When this trend first started, the platform offered its user base a number of copyright-free sounds, but it also offered them the ability to upload their own sounds to the platform. This resulted in plenty of users uploading copyrighted music, which then led to big labels and distributors threatening the platform with legal action. The issue was quickly resolved, as the platform struck several licensing agreements with the biggest music labels and distributors, which allowed the users on the app to use practically any song in their videos.
However, some of the biggest beneficiaries of those licensing agreements have been \ artists around the world – both signed and unsigned. Because the users of the app are free to utilize any sound or song in their videos, practically any song can go viral, which leads to the song then becoming popular on streaming platforms such a Spotify or Amazon Music. Once it reaches that level of popularity, it’s usually signed with a big label and finally released on radio stations around the world.
This means that plenty of previously unknown musicians and artists now have a brand new opportunity for chasing their dreams and marketing their music via the platform. That also means a single video-sharing app has managed to drastically change how music marketing works in the span of a single year.
One of the best ways for artists to market their music on TikTok platform is to create a catchy hook for their song and package it along with a challenge or a dance. The strategy is similar to the old one where artists would make music and release it along with a video to make them more popular for younger generations.
