How to add your own music to your next TikTok

Trending TikTok sounds have made careers for many young artists in the last couple of years. Here’s how you can upload your original music to TikTok and maybe even add your name to that list.

by Randi Zimmerman of Symphonic Blog

Although TikTok is not a guaranteed method for maximum exposure, it has definitely rewarded many up-and-coming artists with significant growth over the years. Sometimes an artist may go viral from sheer luck alone, but there are many ways you can improve your chances and work with the algorithm to reach thousands of potential fans extending from TikTok followers to streams on Spotify, Apple Music, and more. In this post, we’ll explain what we know about converting those views to streams in no time.

How TikTok Views Can Improve Your Spotify Streams

Before you can start optimizing your content, you have to get your music on TikTok first.

Luckily for our Sym fam, we have a partnership with TikTok that lets our clients to deliver their tracks onto TikTok for its millions of creators to use in their videos. (800 million users worldwide, to be exact.) This offers an amazing opportunity for our clients to spread their music through one of the most popular apps in the world, with us to guide them along.

If you haven’t done this already, it’s not too late. We made a whole video explaining how to do it, which you can check out below…

Once you’ve got that covered, you’re ready to go!

Let’s dive in…

Use The Catchiest Part Of Your Song

While filling out the form to get your track on TikTok, you’ll see the “Clip Start Time” field. This section informs TikTok about when the clip you send to their platform should start. For example, if you have a 6-minute track and want to start the clip at 47 seconds, you would enter a start time. of “00:00:47”.

The duration of the clip we send to TikTok is 30 seconds long. Once your clip is on the TikTok platform, you and other users can use your song. That being said, whatever you submit, make sure you use the catchiest part of your song (for obvious reasons).

Put Spotify Links in your TikTok Bio

If your song does blow up, your new followers and viewers are going to want to hear more. Make it easy by having your links to socials and streaming platforms right in your bio. You can use something like Linktree to put one link in your bio that goes to everything you have instead of having a million separate links.

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Feed your brain…

Symphonic Becomes First Independent Music Distributor to Offer Advanced Royalty Analytics for TikTok

How Do TikTok Streaming Royalties Work?

Social Media Trends Independent Musicians Need To Know in 2023 

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Follow Trends

The For You page is a great tool for staying on top of what’s popular on the app. Hopping on the latest trends is an easy way to get seen by more people and blow up the engagement on your present and past posts. In the Search Bar, you’ll also see a list of trending sounds with the number of times they’ve been used in TikTok videos. Even more, the Discover Tab also features a ton of different trending sounds and topics to choose from. You can check these places and take notes for the future so you always have content to share.

Master Your Hashtag Strategy

Hashtags are important on almost every platform, and on TikTok the right hashtag strategy can significantly increase the reach, engagement, and visibility of your content.

The key to any successful strategy is having clear, actionable goals set in advance. Ask yourself:

• “What am I trying to do by posting this video?”
• “Who am I trying to reach?”
• “What do I want them to do? (Share it? Stream my music on Spotify? *wink wink*)

Whatever you decide, keep these goals in mind with everything you do. If you want to reach a wider audience, using the most popular hashtags works wonders. We did a whole post that breaks down the magic of having a great TikTok hashtag strategy. Check that out right here.

Use TikTok’s Promote Feature

In 2021, TikTok launched a tool called Promote to help creators on the platform reach more people with their videos. With this feature, you can turn any organic TikTok video into an ad right from the app and start reaching new audiences, build your following, and drive traffic to your website, and in turn, your streaming profiles. Once you run a Promote campaign, you also get insights into your audience and how your videos are performing to help you improve your efforts moving forward.

In Conclusion…

All these tips will help your videos reach a wider audience, help you funnel those users over to your socials, and help you gain more streams in the process. Although TikTok isn’t a foolproof way of getting streams, there’s no denying the success many artists just like you have seen from it.

Compared to other social platforms, TikTok boasts better brand recall than any other platform. That means when you post on TikTok, your content sticks in the minds of your viewers more than anywhere else. As an artist using TikTok to advertise, promote, and share with their fans, this is a major source of engagement to take advantage of.

Want to learn more? Sharpen your TikTok skills by checking out our TikTok guide! In it, we share inside knowledge for artists looking to optimize their efforts on the platform. // Download it for free right here.