Going viral on TikTok and no idea why
A look at what happens when you go viral on TikTok
I've only recently gone back into doing my music. A couple of years into my musical efforts, I'd gotten distracted by other things and spent the next couple of years
doing no music beyond playing in a local band.
A few weeks ago I decided to check back into my Landr distributor dashboard. I'd stopped checking for royalties after the first few weeks when there were so few streams that it seemed a pointless exercise. When I checked again for the first time in a couple of years I was surprised to find not only royalties waiting to be collected, something even less expected, that one of my tracks had gone viral on TikTok!
I'd never given any thought to TikTok. When choosing streaming services I'd often (or so I thought) had the message that my track was not accepted by TikTok because the algorithm looking at it thought it contained sound effects, or some such thing. I just decided to ignore it and move on, so finding out that my music had actually ended up on TikTok and one track had nearly 230k views came as a complete surprise.
My distributor dashboard shows TikTok engagement in it's own dedicated section and shows one of my early compositions, Winter Wonderland (Flute & Guitar Duet) has received nearly 230k views and included in 156 'creations'
Spurred on by this interest, I've just released Winter Wonderland as a very easy piano duet, for the beginner pianist and, more recently as a quartet featuring two flutes, piano and cello.
Now, there's nothing very different about this piece of music. It's extremely pretty, but then so are many of my pieces.
As I'm totally unfamiliar with TikTok, I find it hard to imagine what is driving those numbers.
After some Googling I found out that if I claim my artist profile on TikTok it would show me the video content using my music how my music (beyond the streaming statistics).
'Going viral' isn't as good news as you might think as TikTok doesn't pay per view but per creation and with less than 200 creations, that is obviously just a fraction of the people seeing the videos containing my music.
As you can see, Winter Wonderland is very popular with Italians and Brazilians but it's still a mystery to me what is driving this popularity. I managed to sign up for a TikTok account then followed the instructions for claiming my 'artist profile'.
This is where things got difficult as TikTok kept refusing to accept the screenshots they insist on as evidence that I am the artist behind the relevant tracks. I tried twice to no avail, then sent similar screenshots via their feedback as the interface had changed and I couldn't even find the link to claiming my profile.
The result of that effort was even worse as the only response I got was that TikTok believed I was trying to impersonate someone (presumably myself?). So, after all that effort I still have no idea how my music is being used on TikTok as it's set to remain a mystery to me.
I tried yet again recently to claim my artist profile and got this very unhelpful response:
The silver lining is that finding that people have been engaging with my music while I, myself was completely ignoring it motivated me to get back into it and try to earn back some of the money that I have spent on it.
To that end I've signed up to study music performance and am very excited at the prospect of being a music student for the first time since I left highschool at the ripe old age of 54!
Download my free PDF here (no signup).
