The average TikTok user is on TikTok for about 52 minutes per day, and TikTok has about 1 billion global users. With that amount of people on TikTok, it is bound to affect the taste in music, food, trends in some way, and it most certainly does.

The rise of social media in the music industry has created new outlets for different artists to reach their fans. Instagram, to Snapchat, to Facebook groups, and then arguably the biggest social media outlet, TikTok.

TikTok is a short-form, video-sharing app that allows users to create and share 15-second to 3- minute videos on any topic they want. This has allowed music artists to share their lives with their fans online, and share other news about what has gone on in their lives such as drama, fan events, or even new music drops.

 The rise of social media has created a new outlet to help these artists connect to their fans, they can follow what they do on Instagram, Snapchat, or even join Facebook groups if you want to chat with other fans. 

Artists have used TikTok to blow up and labels are taking notice, Kristen Bender, Senior Vice President of digital strategy and business development at Universal Music Group has taken notice, “TikTok has really become a critical part of artist storytelling,”, “Since we signed our deal with TikTok earlier this year, our labels have been extremely leaned into the platform.”

With TikTok becoming an integral part of artists getting themselves out into the open, new artists are using the platform to help their songs blow up. They release their songs off on Spotify, Apple Music, and all of those platforms, then proceed to try to make their song go viral as a TikTok sound, and hope people will traffic their song on different platforms.

A perfect example of this advertising was the artist “Stellar”, back during the Spring of 2020 when quarantine was at it’s peak and one had something to do he released his song “Ashes” and then went on a torrid TikTok campaign trying to advertise his song as a sound as much as possible, trying to make his song get as many views as possible on TikTok, from telling his ex he wrote that song about him to try and get a viral video, to giving away a couch if people could recognize the artist who sung his song, people started using his song in their videos because the videos that were using his sound had been blowing up. Now videos were using his song. From videos about how rare is your hair to videos about making a McDonalds sandwich, to even a video about backing cars up into a carrier, everyone was using it.

His advertising campaign led him to get 1.2 million videos to use his sound on TikTok and almost 2 million monthly listeners. Safe to say he wouldn’t be here without TikTok.

Dan Whateley of Business Insider states about TikTok , “Marketers can also hire influencers to try to make a song take off, sparking a wave of user-generated posts from their fans. And some artists even write songs that directly reference TikTok trends in the hope that it will help it gain steam on the app.”

For example as early as two days ago you could see Charli D’amelio promoting Taki’s on her account which announced a partnership with her back in July of 2021, as in this video she danced to a song she created about Taki’s, which would make sense.