How to Promote Your Music on TikTok: 10 Essential Tips
Whether you use it every day or you’re more focused on other platforms, it’s pretty important to promote your music on TikTok.
TikTok boasts 1.04 billion monthly active users, and those users are highly likely to discover new artists on the platform.
Not only this, but it has a dedicated artist account system for musicians with several handy features.
We’re going to run through some expert tips, including the essentials of artist accounts.
Ready? Let’s jump right in.
Table of Contents
- Understand TikTok artist accounts
- Set up your TikTok artist account
- Get your profile on-point
- Understand and utilize TikTok sounds
- Keep track of trends
- Use TikTok’s unique features for engagement
- Don’t forget Stories and TikTok LIVE
- Understand your audience with analytics
- Promote your music with Spark Ads
- Know your music, know your goals
1. Understand TikTok artist accounts
TikTok is pretty unique in the way it handles musician-specific accounts.
While Facebook also provides artist accounts for musicians (and you should definitely have one), it’s not nearly the powerhouse for artist discovery that TikTok is.
Instagram, meanwhile, offers a general-purpose account for creators, but does not offer a musician-specific account type.
This is a big part of why it can be particularly rewarding to promote your music on TikTok.
A TikTok artist account allows you to:
- Have control over snippets of your music on TikTok
- Feature your music in a dedicated music tab on your profile
- Pin new releases to the top of your music tab
- Learn insights about your audience with analytics
- Pin your own video to the top of Sound Detail page
We’ll expand on these features throughout the article. First, let’s get your account started.
2. Set up your TikTok artist account
Here’s how to set up your TikTok artist account, with some important preliminary steps.
Release your music with a good distributor
LANDR Distribution's upload form allows you to specify that you want your music in TikTok's audio library.
If you haven’t already, you should release through a distributor that gets your music in TikTok’s audio library.
When setting up your artist account, TikTok will ask you to search for your music in their library so that they can link your account to it.
LANDR Distribution, for example, will get your music on all major social media audio libraries, while also giving you control over each song snippet that will be on TikTok.
Decide whether you want to start a second account
Some artists simply convert their existing personal account to an artist account, but you can create a new one if you’d like to keep these things separate.
To start a second account, go to your profile, tap your username at the very top, and tap add account.
If you’ve already used your phone number to start your first account, you’ll need to start your second account with an email.
We recommend using a dedicated email for promoting your music, as it makes things both easier to manage and a bit more professional.
Convert to an artist account
Go to your profile and tap the three-line icon in the upper right corner to access your settings.
Tap the TikTok Studio option.
Scroll to the More Tools section and tap the Artist Hub icon.
Tap Apply Now, search for your music in TikTok’s library, and tap Claim to claim your artist profile.
Provide the rest of the required information, submit your application, and await approval.
According to TikTok, approval may take up to 30 days.
3. Get your profile on-point
It’s essential to make sure that your profile is as complete and presentable as possible.
While you wait for the approval of your artist account application, you can cover the basics.
This includes:
- An eye-catching profile picture
- A short-but-sweet bio
- A Linktree that connects to the rest of your online presence
- Some posts and reposts that establish you on the platform
Once your artist account is approved, we recommend getting acquainted with the artist-specific features.
Go to the music tab on your profile and pin your latest release to the top.
You can potentially apply for a verification badge (blue check mark) for some added legitimacy to your profile.
However, eligibility for this depends on your notoriety as a public figure, so it may not be necessary if you’re still building a following.
4. Understand and utilize TikTok sounds
Sounds are the snippets of music and other audio that exist in TikTok’s audio library.
Once you have an artist account, you can leverage sounds to make your music more discoverable on TikTok.
It’s important to highlight the most catchy and engaging sections of your songs when specifying the snippets through your distributor.
If you haven’t given much thought to your snippet selection before, you should start doing so from now on!
Additionally, each sound has a Sound Detail page.
This shows all of the TikTok posts that have used that sound.
With an artist account, you can create your own video using a sound snippet of your music and pin that video to the top of the detail page for that sound.
We highly recommend doing this, as it’ll make your music and your profile much easier to discover through other people’s content.
But in order to get people to use your sounds in the first place, you’ll need to gain some more momentum on the platform.
5. Keep track of trends
A good way to get people to use your sounds and engage with your music is to keep an eye on trends and use them to your advantage.
Whether it’s a hashtag challenge, a transformation trend, viral stunt videos, or a reaction trend, there are countless different types of videos circulating at any given moment.
Start by identifying which trends are most suitable for your music.
Find an artist who makes music in the same genre as you and look at the Sound Detail pages for their snippets.
This will give you a sense of the kinds of trends and videos that could help support the discoverability of your music.
If you post content that uses your music and taps into an appropriate trend, this could be a useful way to boost the exposure of your work.
Even if you don’t engage directly with an exact trend or challenge, you should research how music in your genre is used on TikTok.
This will guide you in the creation of your own posts.
Ultimately, keeping your finger on the pulse of the platform is crucial if you want to effectively promote your music on TikTok.
6. Use TikTok’s unique features for engagement
TikTok may be the most powerful social media platform when it comes to the variety of different forms of engagement.
Of course, there are ways in which you should engage with your audience and fellow musicians that are universal to all platforms.
This includes liking and responding to comments, commenting on others’ content, following people in your scene, and beyond.
But there are a few unique features that are key when you promote your music on TikTok.
These include:
- Duets
- Stitches
- The #BehindTheSong hashtag
In case you’re not familiar — Duets allow you to post a video featuring another user’s video side-by-side with your own.
Stitches, on the other hand, allow you to edit a clip of someone else’s video in sequence with yours.
Both of these can be useful in the context of music, but how you use them depends on the genre and scene you work in.
They can be used creatively, for collaboration with other artists or influencers, to add onto certain trends, or for discussions about important music-related topics.
Meanwhile, #BehindTheSong is a popular hashtag for musicians who want to share insights into their creative process. Be sure to use it when talking about the work that went into a song.
7. Don’t forget Stories and TikTok LIVE
Similarly to Instagram, Stories on TikTok disappear after 24 hours.
You can use them to share content that is more spontaneous and directed at your existing followers.
Unlike on Instagram, however, they do not include interactive stickers like Q&As and polls.
TikTok LIVE, meanwhile, can be used to host real-time Q&As with your audience, broadcast your live jams, and more.
Just like on Instagram, you can even invite others to join your live stream with their own feed, making it a collaborative broadcast.
Unlike on Instagram, however, you need a minimum follower count of 1,000 to use TikTok LIVE. You must also be 18 or older.
If you’re above the minimum age but not above the minimum follower count, you can reach out to TikTok support to request the LIVE feature, but there’s no guarantee you’ll get it.
Check out our article about promoting your music on Instagram to dive deeper into Stories and live broadcasts.
8. Understand your audience with analytics
TikTok’s analytics tools for artist accounts are, in our opinion, another one of its stronger features.
They can give you:
- An overview that summarizes key metrics
- Demographic info on your followers, like age and location
- Time periods when you followers are most active
- Engagement rates and overall performance of your content
- Measurement of the growth of your popularity over time
- Metrics of engagement with your live broadcasts
- The usage of your sounds in other users’ content
- Indications of which content types are most successful for you
There are, of course, many more forms of insight you can gather via these tools.
Ultimately, they can help you make important decisions regarding the kind of content you post, when and how often you post it, how you select the snippets of your songs, and more.
It’s much more difficult to successfully promote your music on TikTok without this kind of feedback, so we highly recommend making the most of it.
9. Promote your music with Spark Ads
As we mentioned in our article on social media marketing for musicians, using social media ads to your advantage is worth considering.
You don’t have to create a full-blown ad campaign with unique advertising assets, and you don’t have to have a huge budget.
TikTok’s Spark Ads are useful for musicians who simply want to give a paid boost to the visibility of their content.
Just like boosted content on Instagram, you can target users based on their interests so that you have the best chances of reaching the right people.
We recommend using this to promote a new release, upcoming gigs (targeting the geographic area where the gigs will take place), or a music video.
You can also look at your analytics pages to learn what kinds of content are performing well and use Spark Ads to take them to another level.
10. Know your music, know your goals
TikTok is a very competitive, fast-moving, high-energy environment.
That mean you might sometimes get overwhelmed by how demanding it is to get heard through all the noise.
Two ways to avoid this are to stay in touch with the development of your skills as a musician and to have concrete goals.
Maybe you want to focus on producing a new EP, or you want better attendance at your gigs, or you’re seeking new collaborators.
Whatever it is, the more specific your creative and promotional goals are, the more focused your social media efforts will be.
And, of course, it can be a huge help to seek out experienced pros who can support you in your journey.
It’s all about leveraging all the resources available to you in a way that feels authentic to your scene and your vision as an artist.
Various contributors from the LANDR team of music mentors.
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