Popular social media app TikTok is doing big things for upcoming artists.
TikTok has launched a new tool that will help independent upcoming artists navigate its service, upload music, and get paid for its use, as well as market and promote themselves on the platform.
Called Sound On, the tool gives creators a dashboard of real-time analytics to view how their music is performing on the app, as well as access to a team of dozens of employees who are working directly on SoundOn who can help identify marketing and promotion opportunities within the app.
Head of Music at TikTok, Ole Obermann explained why they came up with the new tool.
“We were hearing from a lot of artists that they loved being on TikTok and trying to build their community and hopefully reach really big audiences, but they were pretty overwhelmed, they didn’t really understand how to get onto TikTok, get music onto TikTok, so what we came up with was, let’s have a special entrance into the platform that’s only available to these new and undiscovered artists, and then we’re gonna have a chance to work much more closely with them if this is the route they choose to come in. The goal is, really, that we find the promising artist and we walk them from the backstage door right onto the main stage.”
Tik Tok said that SoundOn will pay out 100 percent royalties to music creators in the first year, and 90 percent after.
SoundOn has been beta-tested in territories such as Brazil and Indonesia for the past several months, but the company will roll it out widely to creators in the U.S. and U.K. beginning Wednesday (March 9).