A report commissioned by TikTok confirms what we’ve all known since the social media platform went mainstream in 2020: TikTok drives music streaming, Mashable reported.
Conducted by entertainment data and research company Luminate, the “Music Impact Report” boasts TikTok’s positive influence on the music industry. It found TikTok users are twice as likely to find and share new music on social and short-form video platforms. This finding is unsurprising considering songs often go viral on the platform as part of challenges that encourage viewers to make their own videos featuring the song.
According to Mashable, the “Music Impact Report” shared that TikTok engagement correlates with increased streaming numbers. This finding combined with TikTok’s new partnership with Spotify and Amazon Music “TikTok Music” – suggest the app aimed to further ingrain itself in the music industry.
Billboard reported that the study, commissioned by TikTok and conducted by Luminate, is full of statistics demonstrating TikTok’s power. First and foremost: “Higher TikTok engagement – whether that’s likes, views, or shares – corresponds with elevated streaming volumes.”
According to Billboard, this is why labels have been pestering their acts to post, post more, and post again, sometimes to their artists’ chagrin. On top of that, U.S. TikTokers “are nearly twice as likely to discover music on short-form video platforms than the average user of social media or social-form video platforms,” according to the study’s analysis.
Artists and labels all know that TikTok can galvanize an audience to share and stream and buy; what thy don’t know is how to trigger that activity. Spend on ads? Pay influencers? Pray? And maddeningly, even when songs do go viral on the app, some of them don’t turn into streaming hits at all.
Musically reported reported the findings from the report include the claim that TikTok users are “significantly more likely” to use a paid music streaming service than the average consumer, and that they spend “significantly more money” on music products (for example, merch and tickets) than the average listener.
While this isn’t quantified globally, the report does provide US stats. There, 62% of TikTok users pay for a streaming service compared to 43% of consumers over all.
Meanwhile, 38% of TikTok’s American users attended a live music event and 45% bought artist merch in the last year, compared to 33% and 35% respectively for overall music listeners.
The report also claims that TikTok users “have a stronger preference for international music than the average music listener.” That’s based on their answers to a question about whether they see ‘access to music by global artists’ as being extremely important for their choice of streaming service. 28% of TikTok’s US users said yes compared to 21% of overall listeners.
Considering all of this, it seems to me that there are a whole lot of music fans that prefer to listen to music on TikTok than on other music streaming services. This group also buys merchandise and tickets to music concerts.