 Alright, so it was just about a year when every moron and their mother thought TikTok was only for dances and zoomers to talk about their pronouns or whatever dumb character everyone painted of it. But now it has become abundantly clear that nothing moves music promotion the way TikTok does with nearly every big breakout song having a TikTok trend associated with it or even just a lot of artists who are doing really well promoting their music on there and making traction. And because of that you have nearly every label mandating that there needs to be a TikTok plan in place before an artist puts out a song since the amount of effort you need to put in to get hundreds of thousands or even millions of streams is kind of incomparable to anything we've ever seen in music before. But just as last year the conversation about TikTok wasn't accurate to what was really going on and people like me were trying to tell you all what was really going on I've seen a lot of bad advice in an accurate chatter about what's really happening with the platform. So this video I want to discuss how TikToks changed along with how you can study TikTok in order to know the game as well as a few cool new tools and some accurate real data that I verified on how you blow up on TikTok. 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 a lot of what I do with my time is consultation calls with musicians where I answer their questions and talk strategy to build their fanbase. Because there's so many people running their mouths repeating things they've never fact checked or verified a lot of bad information gets passed out. So I want to discuss verifiable things that I've seen for building a fanbase on TikTok and discuss why some of the bad advice may have broken your brain and caused you to not blow up on TikTok since truly I hear lies about the TikTok algorithm that are easily proven to be wrong like pretty much every day. And the weirdest thing with TikTok is there's all these absolute idiots who just decide that there's some rule to getting views and then repeat it and make videos about it even though there's tons of leaks on the TikTok algorithm that contradict what they say. So here's the problem all these YouTube guys who jump into their seats like absolute fools or have explosions going off while they talk they actually repeat a bunch of lies they read some other dumbass wrote on the internet since they really don't fact check things and know they can get away with it. So here's the thing they talk in broad generalizations but here's one thing that everyone who actually works in the music business right now unlike those YouTubers will actually tell you about how you blow up on TikTok. All you hear is how TikTok is the greatest music promotional tool ever but there's a reason it's not super easy for people to figure out how to repeatedly blow artists up because TikTok is constantly shape shifting and what works in one genre is not what works in another. So people like me who get hired to write what we call marketing best practices where a label will pay me to show them what works and put it on paper well the problem with TikTok is that there is some of those best practices which I've discussed in my past videos which I encourage you to watch after this it will be linked on the screen at the end but all of this is to say that you can't actually master TikTok unless you use a technique to study your specific music genre and niche of TikTok and in a second I'm going to tell you how to do that and you can do it pretty fast but we have to accept that the broad generalizations these YouTube talking head fools speak in don't work because making content that works on TikTok takes getting a sense of the genre you're in and what's happening right at the moment with TikTok because it's always changing but give me one second to make a further point because this is important. One of the things you learn as you get older and wiser is the smartest people analyze the rules of the game and what's effective and then make sure to do them whereas dumbasses just try their hands at things and figure a little figure it out and then a few years later they wonder why they failed so instead of that happening I'm going to show you how in about five hours you can analyze the TikTok game and have a grasp on how to blow up your presence on it and not be miserable when your videos flop. Okay so step one we're going to make a new TikTok account that is just going to be for studying and yeah this is no big deal. TikTok does not care if you do this in fact they encourage it since it makes their user base look bigger. Then after you have this account I want you to go into your targets and follow 20 artists there and if you don't have targets well you obviously haven't watched my video on how to find your community which means you're really f***ing up and should fix that when this video ends as it's linked down in the description. Anyway you just need 20 similar artists then the algorithm will know the vibe you like. After that I want you to scroll through and take notes on potential videos you can make as you see what other people are doing and what's working well for other artists that would authentically fit into what you do but the key here is when you see something you like you need to click the heart button and then leave a fast comment it could just be a hell yeah or something quick like a clap or a fire emoji and I know for a long time viewers of this channel if you're shocked at me endorsing a fire emoji take that to mean exactly what it is that this really doesn't matter since just telling the algorithm to show you more things like this but here's the thing every time it shows you any content that's not a musician or something in music I want you to long press and then click not interested since we want this account to show you nothing but inspirational things every time you open it you can use your other accounts that you have for watching goth girls eat watermelons or whatever weird stuff you freaks do with your time trust me I know some of y'all are weird I read the comments on this channel but if you do this for an hour or two you're going to be in a really good place it's going to be showing you tons of inspirational stuff every time you open the app and yes from time to time you're going to have to click not interested still and you're going to have to still like things here and there but really this should feed you tons of inspirational content so that you can get inspired on what you should be doing okay so now that we're studied though we need to make sure you're set up for success so that if your videos actually do well it will transfer over to streams of your music and people will check you out and in order to do that we need a profile with a snappy pitch which I've told you how to do before if you missed that video on that on how to write a pitch that gets people curious about going deeper with you it's linked in the description but you should put that pitch in your bio but most of all when you reach 1000 followers you can have a link in bio and when you do that you need to have a koji for your link in bio so here's a crazy thing I learned this week I was having a conversation with the CEO of koji Dmitri Shapiro and there's a funny thing since there's not a lot of quick data in tiktok analytics you can't see this because you being the best link in bio service in the game they themselves can see lots of data and when their pages get clicks and he told me that when you make your videos if you call out the link in bio to play your song or check out other things you do and really call attention to the link in bio it often gets 90 percent more clicks than if you don't I know so many of you have complained when your videos go viral on tiktok that not enough people check out your music well that's because you need to give them a hint so at the end of your video flash a sticker in the last five percent of time that says stream our song that's playing right now link in bio and guess what koji has the data to show that it works which reminds me koji is actually the sponsor of this video and they offer what I consider to be the best experience for a fan to have when they want to learn more about you koji is a link in bio app store for careers it offers a free to use free to customize link in bio platform is truly the best link in bio for musicians I mean I use it myself I mean just look at these profiles I have on the screen they look amazing and that could all be done for free but here's the thing that you've probably seen ones like link tree but koji has this app store where you can do amazing experiences for fans to get to know you or interact with them or build relationships and even make money and I want to say these are not iOS apps nothing to download these are link in bio apps that live in the link in your bio on all your socials 24 seven so let me show you a few of the apps that I find to be amazing for music marketing audio inbox is one where fans can pay to send you a voicemail and receive a response for questions or just to delight your super fans which goes hand in hand with shout out which is the video version of it then there's tip booth where you can collect tips from your fans that go towards specific expenses or projects kind of like a kickstarter without all the hassle you have to go through to do one of those your fans will tip you more if you show them what you need tips for so use this to do that there's also orco where you can choose from hundreds of drop ship products and sell instantly in your custom storefront I recently actually made a video on how to build a profile with koji I showed a whole lot more depth that you can check out which is linked in the description below but you should also go learn more and get your own free koji link and bio paid for a link head to the description of this video or head to with koji dot com that's W I T H K O J I dot com if you want to sign up in seconds hit that link in my description if you have any questions about koji or link and bios in general pop them in the comments and either me or someone from koji will make sure to get you an answer but we aren't done with how you learn tiktok once you followed all those musicians similar to you and scrolled through the for you page for an hour or two you should have a lot of notes on what works and some ideas but also the algorithm will be 95% of the time showing you only inspiring content but then I want you to diversify it up a little bit since there's the thing that while you need to learn your genre and what works most genius ideas come from when you see something outside your genre and bring it into your genre so in the description I have a list of a bunch of musicians who are really good at tiktok follow them and remember to get inspired from outside your genre as it could be potentially huge for you if you find the right inspiration even if these artists are nothing like what you do they can have great ideas that you can bring to your own genre with your own authentic vibe I also want you to go a little deeper since as I said we need to understand the game and how it works if we want to have repeated success instead of just happy accidents where a video here and there goes big with all the musicians you follow take the time to visit their profiles occasionally and look at what should their videos blow up but also the ones that flop make observations and this will really teach you what works and doesn't pick one a day to look around and study and think about how your content can reflect what they do well and avoid what's not working well okay one last tip though on how tiktoks changed so many people don't realize tiktok's parent company bite dance has made a video editor called cap cut that links up with tiktok is a ton of powerful features for making content as all the creators on the platform are getting better the raw bad edits that so many people have on their videos are starting to kill their engagement and you need to level up not only does making your videos in cap cut make it faster and easier but truly they come out way better and they aren't even paying me to praise it like that if I'm being honest I still make my tiktoks and DaVinci resolve but the key is getting your tiktoks tight and moving at the pace of your genre on tiktok is crucial to stimulating the algorithm so grab this free tool as it's on iOS Android or Mac desktop so here's the thing while you just learned how to study to make great content on tiktok like I said you need to know the rules of the game so you got to watch this video next to understand that so make sure you click right there and watch the next video if you really want to level up or hit the description and watch my playlist on how to promote your music on tiktok that is a ton more information