TikTok pays some of the money to record labels, making its way to artists when their songs go viral. But the biggest money comes when songs have been streamed hundreds of thousands of times as people want to hear more than just a snippet of the TikTok audio of the moment. This could lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties, Mr. Bruce said, which are then divided among the song rights holders — for Ms. Trainor, which could include her companies and other songwriters.
“These are things we literally have nothing to do with,” said Mr. Bruce. “It just happened, people used the song and I made the moment.” Then, he added, since Ms. Trainor was already an avid user of the platform, it was easy for her to immerse herself in TikTok culture, responding to fans and reposting videos with her reactions along. The fans ate it.
For music industry executives who crave the kind of success Ms. Trainor has had on TikTok — and who had to go the extra mile in persuasion Well-known artists from Halsey to Ed Sheeran deserve to be posted there – this kind of serendipitous spread is hard to manufacture.
said Bill Werde, director of the Bandier Music Business Program at Syracuse University and noted music industry author the news. “But instead of being controlled by the big labels paying kind of big radio programmers to shove a few priority songs down fans’ throats, it’s a lot more messy and elaborate than that.”
So intoxicating was the interest for Ms. Trainor after her pandemic album, that when it came to writing her latest record, she thought deeply about TikTok.
She said, “I remember thinking about how important that was, and how the song ‘Title’ came out, and it made me think, ‘Oh, people on TikTok really love the old school sound I did on my first ever album,’” she said. “I thought, what? If you study All About That Bass and study these old songs and find out why they were so catchy and timeless — why work seven years later, and try to write some of them? And I think that helped a lot.”
Ms. Trainor confirmed that she didn’t write last year’s album “Takin’ It Back” just for the platform. The new material listed her experience of motherhood among other life experiences. But her thinking was in line with how everyone, from aspiring musicians to major record labels, is watching TikTok in 2023, for better or worse.
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