The Chinese platform launched a new service in March to help budding artists produce their music. Without, however, cutting ties with traditional labels.
Produce your own music and distribute it yourself. This is the promise of the Chinese platform TikTok with SoundOn, its new music distribution and marketing tool, available since March 9. Its goal is to help young artists, still amateurs, to get started in music. Those who sign up can distribute their creation for free on TikTok as well as other streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music.
This is what Chloe Adams, a 21-year-old English singer, did. « Since I’ve been on SoundOn, my Spotify listens have tripled, » she says. Still unknown a few months ago, this young performer became known thanks to TikTok. Users danced or staged themselves to the sound of its title Dirty Thoughts, on short videos of fifteen to sixty seconds broadcast on the platform.
Contacted directly by the social network, she is one of the first to register on SoundOn. “I find that this tool is suitable for up coming artists who have not yet signed with labels but who want to promote their music and capture an audience. Today, proud of her one million subscribers on TikTok, she has planned several concert dates in the United Kingdom.
SoundOn is currently available in the US, UK, Indonesia and Brazil. No launch date in France is currently planned for this service which is intended to be one more stone in the well-established marketing strategy of the Chinese platform, which continues to upset the economic model of the music industry.
“A form of disintermediation” TikTok, launched in 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance, has established itself as essential in the emergence of young musical stars. In 2021, TikTok announced in its annual report that 430 songs exceeded one billion views, almost three times more than the previous year (176 songs). More than 175 songs popularized by the platform have climbed into the weekly ranking of the 100 most popular songs in the United States established by Billboard magazine.
And the examples of success are not lacking: this is the case of Lil Nas X, who became known on TikTok thanks to his song Old Town Road, or even of the French Wejdene with his title Anissa. Claire Rosinkranz, Powfu, Priscilla Block… the list keeps growing. “With this new solution, and all the data, statistics and expertise that TikTok has today, we can help organize and simplify the ecosystem of unsigned artists and make it easier for them to get known, and labels can discover these talents”, specifies the group, through its communication department.
