✘ TikTok eats the music industry for breakfast
And: TikTok's squeeze on indie labels; Burn the playbooks; Does live music need an upgrade; Do Androids dream of Balenciaga SS29
The other week TikTok Music shut down. The app formerly known as Resso, Bytedance’s music streaming app in India which shut down on 31 January of this, is no more. The idea behind TikTok Music was to keep people in the TikTok walled garden. Discovery of music happens through the For You page and TikTok’s wonderful algorithm. Instead of pushing users to another platform, they can listen to this music on TikTok’s owned streaming service. But, as we know, licensing deals with the majors are pretty heavy, with most of the revenue going to the rightsholders. What’s the upside for TikTok? There was no significant uptake of TikTok Music. People’s habits and routines around their favourite DSP are hard to break.
SoundOn
Who needs a streaming service, when you already have a distribution arm? The exposure sits on TikTok itself, as well as other social platforms and, of course, on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, etc. Getting the music to these services isn’t hard when you’re plugged into the distribution system. SoundOn focuses, like other distributors, on adding multiple services on top of distribution and royalty management. For SoundOn this focuses on TikTok’s own strengths.
For anyone who’s made a video for social, using something like CapCut is useful. Since so many people use this and those videos will then spread more widely again, getting music to the video creators on CapCut makes a lot of sense.
Marketing support across DSPs is standard business.
The last one is interesting. Only for selected artists, this will help grow your reach across TikTok and beyond.
Ears and creators not fans
The key to success for SoundOn is to get a track out to as many ears as possible. This is done, first and foremost, by getting the track used by as many creators as possible. They need to make the hockey-stick effect happen. In other words, this all about going viral - fleeting moments of fame. Getting many of these moments seems to be the end goal of SoundOn’s playbook. The problem with playbooks is that they do not encourage creativity.
In the countries where TikTok initially launched SoundOn, they started hiring A&R Managers. One such job post from two years ago mentioned:
“In this role you’ll ensure that artists see ByteDance as the #1 partner for artist development, promotion and monetization.”
As Water & Music has shown through their State of Data report and recently published follow-on article on distribution and label services [full disclosure, I worked on both of these], artist development sits closely with audience development right now.
At the moment, and after shutting down TikTok Music, TikTok is hiring multiple people on the SoundOn team - fun fact, there’s also still job openings related to TikTok Music. One of these is a Music Promotion Manager and a key responsibility is to:
“Apply in-depth industry knowledge to use 3rd party marketing tools to convert viral TikTok trends to streaming success on Digital Streaming platforms.”
Success for SoundOn is moving beyond the creators and more towards those ears. They will actively look to create the knock-on effect of a viral hit on TikTok to DSP streams.
To label or to acquire or to squash
It’s tricky when a platform gets in on the distribution game, and starts to behave like a label more and more, because they have such different incentives. One of these incentives is to bring down the cost of licensing. Getting artists to work directly through TikTok will help do so. This is why TikTok tested signing artists to exclusive deals. And this is why TikTok started to focus on acquiring music catalogues, recently hiring a Music Content Investment Manager. More than just being a label, TikTok is playing the music industry at their own game. Labels reinvented themselves into licensing models in the digital streaming era. This gives them a lot of power of negotiation. And while TikTok is happy to fight to achieve better rates, they also see how the game is played.
In a similar vein to the fight with Universal Music Group earlier this year, TikTok announced it won’t deal with Merlin directly, but instead with each indie label respectively. Jem Aswad at Variety reminds us that this can also partially be down to cutting costs and preparing for an eventual sale of the American branch of TikTok if a potential ban comes through. While this may well be true, it also shows that TikTok understands that they can push their own artists as much as anyone else’s.
TikTok might never turn into a label proper, but it knows where to chip away at the standards the recorded music industry has built for itself over the past 15 years or so. If, on a broad scale, TikTok eats away little chunks of revenue and cash, it will have had a solid breakfast - leaving the music industry waiting for their brunch invitation.
LINKS
😤 Inside TikTok’s money squeeze on Independent Labels: ‘This is a classic divide-and-conquer situation’ (Jem Aswad)
“Some speculate that the motivation for this move — as well as TikTok’s combative negotiations with Universal and, earlier, Warner Music — is due to a company-wide mandate to cut costs at every opportunity in advance of a partial or entire sale, which is at least partially related to the upcoming presidential election and longstanding pressure from factions in the U.S. government for ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. division, such as the lawsuits filed Monday by attorneys general from 14 states alleging that the platform has “addicted” young people and harmed their mental health.”
✘ As per my piece above, I have many thoughts about TikTok’s approach to benefiting from the music industry over the past couple of years. I don’t think any of the major players are handling this particularly effectively, leaving TikTok to pick up little wins across the board that amount to a large win overall. As my kid would say: hmmph
🔥 Burn the playbooks (Packy McCormick)
“They make the playbook the main thing. The playbook should never be the main thing. Playbooks are too easy to copy.”
✘ Yes to this. The world is already getting too homogenous and formulaic. Burn the playbooks and get creative.
🆙 Does live music need an upgrade (Sean Adams)
“One of the reasons most of these ideas (I'll share a few below) haven't happened is because the experience of watching an incredible live performance doesn't really need to be upgraded. No tech could improve seeing Young Fathers, Health or Pharmakon at full force making a glorious intense feast of noise in a small venue. No AR filter is going to compete with closing your eyes and being swept up by a Sigur Ros set at dusk. No app or sound wizardry is going to enhance seeing Phoebe Bridgers or Cat Power in a chapel with lots of natural reverb. Nothing compares to seeing Saul Williams reading his poetry whilst Youthmovies and Foals played an improvised set. I could go on and on... I'm a bit of a future gazer. I am constantly looking for the small incremental changes that can enhance music.”
✘ I think the point of this futuregazing is that any development to upgrade the live experience should come from the artist themselves. If they feel that a certain bit of tech can create the type of atmosphere they’re looking for, then they need to implement it. Sean has some great ideas in this newsletter this week.
🐑 Do Androids dream of Balenciaga SS29 (Arabelle Sicardi)
“Dystopian survivalists need not worry. Barrat's Balenciaga AI is a continual work of conversation, experimentation, and curation—just like analog designing so often is. The silhouettes are legitimate, but the gradients are unearthly and fragmented, with often no delineation between where the “human” model stops and the clothing begins. Sometimes it eerily perfects variations of what's really gone down the runway and sometimes—the best times—it ekes out the most bizarre and joyful spacey surprises.”
✘ This is a wonderful conversation on AI between Arabelle and Robbie Barrat. They touch upon how any AI-driven tool won’t showcase the kind of leftfield creative input that ends up in the weirdest output.
💌 A reminder to RSVP to my workshop at ADE if you’re around - there’s some guest list available for those without a PRO pass.
MUSIC
The recently released collection of demos from Broadcast is a set of songs that I’m glad have found their way to my ears. She sounds rough and amazing and sonically it’s all already there.
Very good post., Maarten Can I translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?