Your track’s gone viral on TikTok: What to do?

The rapid-fire algorithm of TikTok has played hit-maker to more than a few artists, and the chance of your track blowing up on the platform is greater than ever. Here, we look at what to do if it happens.

Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog

Facilitating the possibility of major recognition at speeds beyond what we’ve ever seen before, TikTok is no joke. Once unheard of artists are seeing their tracks blow up in a single day. Singles are being discovered and given their chance to shine by users all over the world. On TikTok, virality is more reachable than ever. So, what do you do after your track goes viral? How can you ensure the royalties from your song actually get to you? Here’s what you can do…

What To Do If Your Track Goes Viral on TikTok

What is TikTok?

As one of the most downloaded apps in the world, TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Their mission? To inspire and enrich people’s lives by offering a home for creative expression. Click To Tweet

It allows users to upload 15-second videos to a scrollable feed, using background music from their diverse library of songs. Additionally, TikTok’s “Sound Selection” page within the app has discovery features like genre playlists and “Hashtag Challenges” that encourage users to get creative with music and engage with trending topics. — These discovery features have made TikTok a viral platform for artists, and we love that for them.

However, with services that are this popular, new, and widely used, there are bound to be some problems.

Let’s talk copyright…

We’ve discovered that content from many record labels and artists is being uploaded by users without proper copyrights or metadata. This leads to a lot of missing royalties for artists like you. No need to fret, we can help here. Symphonic delivers material for TikTok users to be able to use on their profiles legally and with credits to the original rightsholders. However, the platform itself enables any user to take music and upload it to TikTok.

With it being so new, a lot of potential songs are not yet “claimed” and associated to the original rightsholders recording.

What can you do?

We wanted to do our best to solve this and have created this form for distributed clients to send us this information for us to communicate to TikTok directly.

If you are not a distributed client and are interested in ensuring your song is protected and monetized on TikTok, please apply via our website at www.symdistro.com and reference this article as well as provide notes and information explaining that you have a song that is being used on TikTok without your authorization. Then, we’ll get to work on your behalf.

——

Want to learn more about TikTok? // Check out these additional resources:

• How to Get Your Music on TikTok
• Best TikTok Hashtag Strategy for Musicians
• How the TikTok Algorithm Works
• How to Figure Out The Best Time to Post on TikTok