Music on TikTok - From Saltburn to Taylor Swift
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Welcome to Good TikTok Creative! We are Simon Andrews and Anthony McGuire, two people who have been working in marketing, advertising, and media for decades. Find Simon and Anthony on Twitter.
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TikTok Case Study = Music
Simon’s Take:
There is always lots happening with music and TikTok; after all the app started life as Musically before being bought by the Chinese.
The ability to use the best songs empowers creators and widespread usage on the app often results in renewed chart success for the song. There are few better examples than Murder on the Dance Floor - resurrected by the film Saltburn and embraced by TikTok. Its top 10 status was clearly down to widespread usage on TikTok but you can no longer use it for new edits (officially) because Universal Music have pulled all their music from the app as negotiations over payment for music stall.
Universal see 1% of their turnover come from TikTok and believe it should be higher.
But one of their artists came back to TikTok in a big way. The return of Taylor Swift was announced and it surprised many people. But within a few days it became clear; TikTok announced “The Tortured Poets Department” in-app experience, featuring what it says are multiple “first-of-its-kind” features. Supporting the surprise drop of 15 new tracks clearly trumps the ongoing spat about commission rates
Coincidentally there is also a new push on music, with TikTok encouraging people to add songs on Spotify. I keep seeing a classic Al Green song but the link gives TikTok the right to gather data on the app usage.
Digging deeper, TikTok has a new partnership with both Spotify and Amazon around adding music to soundtracks;
Now active in 19 markets this seems a smart move by TikTok. But what of their own Music player; TikTok Music? The app was updated in the last week so it is still a live project. Does the data captured by TikTok on the playlist ever become fuel for acquisition by TikTok Music?
A backdrop to all this saw the latest Grammys take place, with British singer Rae winning 6 awards. In a smart bit of marketing Hilton had organised Rae to do an exclusive concert for their top customers. Even smarter they used clips from the concert as TikTok ads driving viewers to a 5 minute clip of the concert on YouTube.
Can TikTok break new talent as well as it amplifies existing? Watch @tellthemtills who is pushing one song with lots of videos - picking up decent organic numbers and and engagement - with repost by Stormzy.
Anthony’s Take:
TikTok’s beauty comes from a mixture of both organic and paid content, the ability to witness both naturally occurring viral moments and massively boosted immersive ad campaigns. This week we’re examining how that happens in the music vertical.
For example, the film Saltburn came out in November 2023 and featured a scene where the main character Oliver, played by Barry Keoghan, dances along to the 2001 song “Murder On The Dancefloor” by Sophie Ellis-Bextor. The memorable scene caused the song to re-enter the top music charts, decades after its release. A similar thing happened when the Netflix series Stranger Things featured Kate Bush’s 1985 song “Running Up That Hill,” bringing the song back into the music charts in 2022.
Older songs can re-enter popular culture through content. The interesting part is how that viral growth loop happens on TikTok. People started taking inspiration from the Saltburn scene to create their own videos of dancing along to “Murder On The Dancefloor.” TikTok encourages mimetic behavior—trends inspire people to copy videos and create their own remixed versions. So soon there were plenty of videos of people all around the world creating their own TikToks dancing to “Murder On The Dancefloor.”
And shortly afterwards, Sophie Ellis-Bextor was performing at more music festivals and started putting out her own TikToks singing and dancing along to her own song, which also serves as a tribute to the film Saltburn. This mixture of film, music, and dance comes together so naturally on TikTok, and can happen very quickly.
In many ways, the story about “Murder On The Dancefloor” becoming popular again was a bigger story about social phenomena. While the director of Saltburn Emerald Fennell intentionally picked the song for the film, there’s no way she could have predicted the subsequent virality that manifested on TikTok.
On the flipside, other music endeavors on TikTok can be very meticulously planned and expensively produced. For example — Taylor Swift, the biggest musician in the world right now.
On April 19th, Taylor released her latest album The Tortured Poets Department. There’s a fully immersive, customized in-app experience on TikTok to promote her music. Taylor has built a kind of mini-app within TikTok that gives people different challenges and rewards based on following Taylor’s TikTok accounts, presenting the user with reward mechanisms and gamification.
There is a curated group of official videos from Taylor Swift, ranging to high quality production ad creative promoting the album to clips from her at live concerts talking about the album. There are clips of songs from the new album that are presented to be easily sharable and used in your TikTok videos.
And most critically—and most uniquely TikTok—there is a section in this Taylor Swift “mini-app” that focuses entirely on reaction videos. Nestled under the relevant Taylor hashtags, several videos are presented of different fans reacting with massive excitement to hearing the news that Taylor has a new album coming out. There are also videos of fans reacting to specific lyrics in Taylor’s songs. It’s incredibly authentic and genuine content that provides a human touch to what is clearly a massively well funded beast of a marketing campaign.
Compared to “Murder On The Dancefloor” going viral on TikTok because of Saltburn, Taylor Swift’s marketing onslaught is much bigger and shrewdly planned. For artists, record labels, artist managers, and brands, TikTok is the place to be to promote your music—whether you’re an independent artist, older singer, or current popstar.
However, not everyone seems to agree with that. Taylor Swift is currently on TikTok but Universal (her record label) has pulled most of their artists music off the platform in a licensing dispute. And there’s still the big question about a TikTok ban. No matter what happens, music will still inevitably be drawn into the orbit of TikTok.
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