 So you may have noticed I've largely avoided talking tiktok on this channel as I think there's a crucial part of being a talking head that people trust to only talk about what you're a real expert on. And because I'm a bit long in the tooth as they say and tiktok was the place the youths were congregating, I felt like maybe I should pick my battle on a field where I could win the battle. But things have changed. I've studied up over the past year and a half and the app is hitting a new point in its growth where it's not just the youth dancing around and tiktok is now for everybody. Which means you should probably be there. I mean, after all, they've surpassed youtube and watched time per month as well as boasting a billion users worldwide. So in this video, I'm going to catch you up on where we're at with tiktok and tell you how to promote your music there without doing stupid dances. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fanbase from 0 to 10,000 fans and this is Muse Formation. So one of the things I feel like people always forget is whatever way a social network starts off, it rarely is that in just a year or two. Let's remember Facebook started off as a place where college kids connected with their classmates then became the most important place to market your music. But it's now the worst place to do that as it's turned into a hellscape of your relatives sharing the stupidest memes on politics and claiming lizard people are running society and ignoring that there's only one lizard and that's the psycho lizard who's the CEO of Facebook. Let's remember just a decade you also always just heard that Instagram was only a place for narcissists taking photos of themselves then it became it was for kids that I remember some truly deranged takes that it was the only happy place on the internet and now it's just the place where we converge to get updated on everyone and everything we're interested in and I tell you all this to say that if you're saying you're too old or not hip enough for tiktok you've missed that we've hit a new phase of the app and all are welcome and beginning to congregate there so please drop the shyness and get in now I know some of your hesitance is that you really don't want to do silly dances and degrade your stoic polished facade since after all you're a serious artist but allow me to put you at ease with some good news do you have to do stupid dances no do you have to do backflips no do you have to twerk okay I'm going in but if you're still not sold let me tell you the most important reason you should be on tiktok all I hear from you all is you want to get on that instagram explore page so tons of people will learn who you are and again expose to your music but let me tell you what's 10 times more powerful than the instagram explore page tiktok's actual feed that everyone watches all day long in fact the average user time is almost an hour now per day when I hear about how everyone wants to get on that explore page on Instagram I laugh since so many users don't even look at that but the main feature of tiktok is like its explore page that learns exactly what you like and then serves you more of it most of what you're actually served on it are people who you don't follow instead the app is truly genius at learning what you like and don't like and giving you new people or making content similar to what you already have enjoyed I like many other people who use it and continually astounded at how good it got at finding what I like and ignoring what I don't give a f**k about but to spell this out for you if you are thinking about joining one of the things I am most enthused about for musicians which is enabling tons of music discovery in both the feed and when your song becomes a tiktok trend and trust me I've seen it over and over again if your song starts to get used in lots of tiktoks people then run over and stream it on spotify unlike what happens on that instagram explore page many times there's so much opportunity to find your audience I think we're finally at the point where if you don't get started today you're going to look back an absolute regret that you didn't rethink what you know about the platform since even if you find what you've seen on it totally cringe tiktok has changed enough that you can find your niche of what you do there just as you probably eventually did on instagram or twitter or god forbid so if you're convinced to try it now let me talk to you about how it's changed and what you should be doing now that there's a billion people there the diversity of what people enjoy and want has far exceeded just good-looking people doing silly dances we're now in this era of the platform that I find to be one of the most promising and exciting ones when the rules are changing and you can explore and exist freely and create without boundaries as we're not all settled in what the boundaries are yet you don't need to watch the trends unless you want to and instead you could do what you would want to see and what you would like to see if someone else did and what's amazing is the algorithm after you do that can help others who would want that find it now I know for a lot of you you can be scared of embarrassing yourself by doing something far off the reservation that will be cringe if that's your fear I have a simple suggestion for you use the search function look up some hashtags of the music genre or some of your interests and follow them look it up from time to time and just scroll around if you look up at what I have on the screen now you can see how to bounce between using what's most popular or just seeing some of the most relevant ones that have been recently posted watch what other people are doing and get a feeling for tiktok and even if those interests are things like broke English literature or obscure 90s video games there's still people making tiktoks about that stuff here but one of the reasons so many people were turned off of tiktok for so long is it seemed like this super dancing based way of telling stories and for the rhythmless or less performative amongst us it didn't feel like this was our place to dwell but that has changed now that the platform has expanded so much now I know I talk about storytelling all the time but truly tiktok is a storytelling platform like literally the video I saw I get shared the most this week was just a girl talking about how some dude scammed her by taking her to taco bell on a date and let's remember tiktok is all about storytelling I have a whole playlist on how you tell better stories to promote your music which you can watch now or it's in the description below but here's the headspace I want you to get in you can be yourself on this platform and just observe the format people use to communicate and tell stories or jokes or to learn people about their music and that's the thing here that I think a lot of people were thrown for is they see themselves promoting their music by putting a clip of music video or playing a song like they do on instagram and they didn't think that was acceptable on tiktok but guess what now it's everywhere the days where tiktok is not just a place to keep your audience updated if people are following you is now behind us you can post exactly that and get discovered by new fans as long as you play by the rules I know a lot of you just want to get the word out about your music and you can do tiktoks like hey guys here's our new music video whatever you want to do tell a quick story play your music video you can make videos about your opinions on music current events culture tell people five records you love anything goes there's no rules and everyone's making the rules today and that's what's fun about it and all sorts of things are working right now to get music discovered so you should be doing that no matter what type of music you make since there's an audience here for it and that was a good time to tell you if you are like jesse where are the examples of this there's not enough time in this video to get there but the next one in the series does just that so leave a comment that subscribe and get notified when I post videos so you don't miss the next one where i'm going to give you tons of examples on what you could be posting on tiktok and much much more another way that tiktok has changed is there's now videos of people explaining like quantum physics that have millions of views truly if you know something you think is rare knowledge tiktok is about sharing that and that could build relationships with people that get them to listen to your music but if you just want to promote your music you can make so much creative content around existing footage you have from photo shoots music videos and talk so much about your songs so many people are showing little bits of their songs and showing how they did it they're talking the meaning of two lines of a lyric for a minute in a video they're showing themselves or other people enjoying their music an inception in a fan to listen through that and if you want to learn more about that i made a video i think was one of my viewers favorite videos i've ever made on how using psychological emotional appeals can get people to stream your music if you want to watch that it's on the screen now or in the description one of the strangest things about tiktok is before people dive in they often think it's way more vacuous than it actually is because they get served up some seriously dumb dumb people making things i mean i'm not going to deny that the most concussed idiots flock to this platform but if you let the algorithm learn what you like suit enough the clout goblin zombies disappear and you can find your people but creating on tiktok is actually incredibly interesting there's so many video manipulation tools that could do trippy funny or illustrative things once you explore the creation tools it's hard not to get curious about what you can do with them and the fun that could be had one of the other things i want to impress upon you is tiktok is way more creative than any social network we've ever had truly the tools that they have given you to play with if you're a creative person are just so much fun and you really can go wild i've been messing around with making tiktoks for a month which by the way you can follow me there or on any other social network at at jesse cannon but truly i'm getting addicted to just playing with the tools i don't even post that much until i feel like i've done something great i actually think that's one of the main reasons the platform has grown so fast is the possibilities to do cool things are just so vast one of the most important parts of the platform is that because it serves you to people similar to you and interested in the same things as you it really helps you find your community it could be where an influential person in your genre hears of you it can be where someone who wants to collab with you hears you i seriously hear about that happening constantly it can connect you with rs you play shows with or do cool things because literally what the algorithm does best is connect people with similar traits it's truly amazing for finding community and if all the reasons i told you here weren't appealing enough this is probably one of the most slept on perks of the platform since nothing is better at introducing you to the people who are similar to you but one of the other things you should consider about tiktok is if you are making music that has any sort of momentum meaning even a few thousand plays you should be searching for your songs and encouraging any fans who use them in tiktoks since this is a great way to build bonds and encourage more sharing that gets your music heard since after all tiktok is a really big platform for people sharing music i mean i've been finding some songs i love on the platform in the past year and truly sometimes just searching my favorite genres i found some of my favorite songs of the last year but back to you it's simple to search for your songs by either typing in your artist name or artist and song name and then doing a search on sounds for any tiktoks with them in it but remember sometimes people don't tag the sounds so searching your artist name or song name can find unattributed uses but learning the fans who are passionate about you and encouraging the spreading is how so many tiktok trends grow and we all know if you go viral on tiktok it can be tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of streams on spotify and youtube there's way more you can do with that and we'll get into that in part two okay if you're left wanting to know more i have great news for you in the next few weeks i'm going to put out a lot of videos on tiktok i'm going to keep going in on how you blow up on tiktok and trust me this is just the start if you have things you want me to address definitely drop that in the comments so please like subscribe and get notified so you don't miss any of that if i've made more videos on tiktok you can probably click it on the end screen right now as well on the screen is a playlist on how to go from zero to ten thousand fans as well as how to blow up on spotify click one and learn more thanks for watching