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Record labels used to have beef with TikTok, but now they increasingly consider it instrumental (no pun intended) in launching new songs and new artists. But as music creation and distribution have become more democratized, those record labels have shrunk to be “the smallest segment of the music creator economy,” MIDiA founder Mark Mulligan says.
And one of the biggest segments seeing the most growth? DIY artist distribution on social media platforms like TikTok.
According to MIDiA’s most recent music economy report, a full quarter of musicians upload their songs directly to TikTok and other platforms, completely bypassing distributors, labels, and even streaming services like Spotify. These musicians clearly recognize that TikTok can make songs go megaviral, whether that’s older tracks having a resurgence thanks to a trendy dance or new songs becoming a meme-y earworm, and see the platform as a way to distribute their art directly to fans, without a middleman taking a cut of their revenue (aside from TikTok’s own cut of their ad dollars, of course).
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Another reason artists may be more inclined to upload to TikTok over going the traditional distribution route is the fact that close to half of all musicians who put out music in 2023 had less than five years’ experience in publishing songs, MIDiA found.
In a post about the findings, Mulligan refers to these creators as “the lockdown cohort”–people who got into making music while constrained by COVID. As you probably know, the digital content creator industry as a whole saw a massive boom in new creators during COVID. Well, the music industry saw the same, and just as video content creators got used to the instant sharing capabilities of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, musicians got used to finishing a song and putting it up on social media. Going the traditional route means waiting months for songs to go live; going on TikTok means hitting “Post” and waiting a few seconds to make sure the app didn’t glitch.
There’s also appeal for these creators in the direct-to-fan connection. We’ve written before about how platforms like Patreon and OnlyFans are more and more important to video content creators who want as few interruptions as possible (monetization and otherwise) between themselves and their fans. On the music side, there are “structural fissures beginning to manifest in the traditional streaming economy,” Mulligan says.
MIDiA’s research showed creators are growing increasingly dissatisfied with music streaming services. Part of that dissatisfaction is, of course, how little services like Spotify pay artists per stream, but royalties aren’t actually their main issue anymore.
“Their royalty expectations are already so low that this is no longer a pain point for them. Instead, they are becoming critical of streaming’s ability to further their careers, focusing on the medium’s closed door between them and their fans,” Mulligan says. “Today’s creators want platforms where they can build high value, smaller fanbases, rather than low value, large-but-anonymous audiences.”
There aren’t many places better for high-value fanbase cultivation than platforms like TikTok (and YouTube and Twitch, both of which have also seen surges in content from musicians). The fact that musicians know this means we could see a lot more indie hits get their start on the platform.
The question is, will we see record labels, distributors, and streaming services shift their business models in an effort to try to lure these DIY-savvy creators back to more traditional means of music publishing? And, by that point, will music creators even want to go back?
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