TikTok is the premiere music discovery platform on the planet, but how are artists making money?
Exposure doesn’t pay the bills. As much as musicians enjoy any promotion they receive from a site or platform, money talks. Money makes the world go round, and it plays a role in the music business. It seems every other conversation in entertainment these days involves streaming royalties or a lack thereof. But what about TikTok royalties? The social media giant welcomes over 100-million users every month, most of whom spend hours on the app watching videos that include sound. Do artists get paid? If so, how?
For starters, yes, TikTok does pay artists for use of their music.
In comparison to other major platforms such as Spotify who pay per total number of streams, TikTok operates differently when calculating royalties and bases calculations on the number of videos made using your music, as opposed to the number of times the video is watched. That can often become confusing if you are measuring the way royalties are worked out against othersservices, so it’s important to understand the main difference here is that big view counts don’t equal large royalty payments.
To put it another way, the quantity of videos matters more than the total view count. One hundred videos with no views using a specific sound will generate more money than a single video with one million views. The views don’t matter.
TikTok royalties are based on market shares rather than metric views. To calculate the market shares, TikTok uses what is called “a creation.” A creation is when a user selects a release from TikTok’s library to make a video. Users can then make their own creations inspired by existing creations, all amounting to new creations. So, to put this simply, every time a user decides to use your music to make a video, this generates royalty.
And how much is a video worth? According to estimates online, TikTok royalties were close to $0.0067 per video using your music in 2018 and moved to $0.030 per video in June 2019. Based on these figures, ten thousand uses of this music would generate approximately $300.
Of course, this information is likely to change, TikTok is an evolving platform, and the conversation around royalties is unending. The company could easily choose to approach artist payments from a different position or price point overnight. When they do, we’ll cover it, so make sure you’re following Haulix on Facebook and Twitter.
