Every single content creator wants to maximum exposure on social media. The pinnacle of achievement is going viral. Today we explore how to make TikTok music go viral!

Social media is teeming with activity; it is a veritable hive of influencers, followers, and, more importantly, competitors. Music artists today face different problems than artists of yesteryear. Back in the day, rock stars in the making didn't have TikTok, Instagram, X, Pinterest, or Facebook to mass publicize and optimize videos for pre-orders, pre-releases, concerts, and the like. Marketing and advertising relied solely on gigs, press releases, print newspapers, radio, and TV. Now that artists have free reign to reach the audience directly via social media, things are incredibly different.

The challenges of today are daunting but not impossible. The arrival of social media, particularly mega-popular sites like TikTok, presents artists with plenty of opportunities to reach hundreds of millions of people. Technology is constantly innovating, allowing for the proliferation of unique tools, marketing strategies, and approaches to promoting music online. Nowadays, artists don't need expensive studios to create top-quality music for exposure, launch, and promotion on social media sites like TikTok. 

Further, there is no need to sign up with the music producer for your record label – that's the power of self-promotion on social media. But getting there takes some doing, and that's the challenge. The digital age presents myriad opportunities for massive exposure, largely through creative energy, ingenuity, and boldness. Whether you are active on Apple Music, Spotify, Facebook, or TikTok, there is ample opportunity for you to stand out from the rest with innovative strategies designed to make your music go viral. Of course, the big one is TikTok, where we focus our attention!

Gone in Under 15 Seconds

Microblogging platforms like X.com and TikTok rely on a short window to grab the user's attention. Stats show that social media is actually hampering our attention spans. According to studies, the average person spends over three hours and fifteen minutes daily on social media. The short form format of social media –TikTok and Instagram have reduced our attention span to just eight seconds in 2023 versus 12 seconds in the year 2000. That means there's an incredibly short timeframe to get your message across to your audience. 

Standing out under such conditions requires something truly special, which is the subject of today's post. So, how does TikTok work? As the de facto social media network of choice for the younger generation – that's largely the target market for artists, too - TikTok keeps everything really short. There is zero tolerance for boring material. If the music video cannot captivate your attention within a couple of seconds, it's DOA.

Recall, the average video on TikTok is 15 seconds or less. And it's a vertically oriented video 

that you're watching because most users are on their mobiles. TikTok uses an algorithm to determine what videos users like and feeds them more of that type of content. These are important points to remember when making your music go viral on TikTok. Virality is all about engagement, interaction, views, and likes. The more, the merrier. Once a music video gets shared repeatedly, this rapidly expands the viewership and the potential for further shares, likes, and interactions. 

Brevity encompasses quality. That’s important here. People are looking at video scores in any browsing session – it has to be good and conform to users' generally accepted standards to be shared. TikTok videos feature high-quality audio, typically a few seconds from a song. This could be your own song or a repository of songs. If you've ever watched TikTok videos, you invariably hear the same soundtracks or audio snippets on different videos – that is the idea.

Artist-Inspired Material 

Artist-created content is the best way for artists to go viral. At least, this was the finding in a detailed report by Contraband. According to the statistics, six dozen music artists launched their music careers in 2022, and almost two dozen racked up 1 million Spotify listeners. And well over a hundred artists were not even signed by record labels, attesting to the go-it-alone reality for so many superstars in the making. 

And it's thanks to TikTok that these people became music icons because social media empowered artists through their audience (fan base) to promote music on Spotify with top-tier providers that streamline this process for artists by offering a direct pathway to Spotify playlist curators, eliminating the need to search, analyze, contact, or negotiate with them. Artists simply submit their tracks, set campaign targets, and launch. 

Make Your Play on TikTok

Many of these artists didn't even have to spend anything on marketing and advertising their brands because they simply provided URLs on TikTok to their Spotify pages. It's ingenious marketing that cuts out the middlemen and empowers the artists to no end. Naturally, it's a painstaking process to go from zero to hero on any social media platform, let alone platinum on record charts or Spotify. Again, artist-created content was largely responsible for the virality enjoyed by musicians on TikTok. This easily translates into sales on Spotify.

TikTok has many different genres, styles, trends, and music sensations. Audiences are as wide and varied on the social media platform as they are in our cosmopolitan societies worldwide. Remixes are particularly popular, with millions of listeners on Spotify and millions of likes, shares, and interactions on TikTok. There are strong correlations between the popularity of music styles and genres on social media and the attendant rankings on Spotify. 

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of TikTok videos use popular soundtracks that are recycled over and over again. These are the viral ones, and once a video attains that status, the music accompanying that video automatically gets a mega boost. As examples, consider Kill Bill by SZA, Bad Habit by Steve Lacy, or Bloody Mary by Lady Gaga. Superstars include Justin Bieber, Sean Mendez, J Lo, and Selena Gomez.

Going viral is possible, but it's a lot of hard work. A little good fortune and the right knowledge can get you there much faster!

Here are some quick tips for going viral on TikTok – 

• Make excellent use of hashtags to ensure that the audience sees your content
• Upload your music to TikTok and ensure compliance with standards
• Always follow trends and create content accordingly
• Inspire engagement and participation via tournaments and challenges
• Never stop believing in your audience and actively engage with them
• Try something different, like remixes of your songs
• Work with others to increase your visibility on social media platforms

On that note, we’re sounding off!