TikTok: Helping Music Publishers and Songwriters to get their fair share
A solution for music publishers that gives them track-by-track detail on the use of their music on TikTok
In case you hadn’t noticed, TikTok is kind of a big deal these days. It is the fastest growing social media app in the world. In the United States alone, it is used by 80 million people every month. And for the music industry there’s something else guaranteed to get our attention — music sits right at the heart of the TikTok experience.
Not only does music soundtrack the vast majority of videos on TikTok, but the platform has become a frequent source of viral hits. Just look at the role a skateboarding TikToker played in the return of FleetWood Mac’s “Dreams” to the top echelons of the charts more than 30 years after its release.
So it has been great to see the raft of licensing deals done between TikTok and music rightsholders over the last year. Just this week, Universal announced a new TikTok licence, and agreements like the one announced in July last year with the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and November’s deal with ICE mean that songwriters and publishers are now benefiting from the use of their music on TikTok.
One piece of the puzzle that remains in its infancy, however, is reporting. It is not always easy for music publishers to access detailed information about how their music is being used in TikTok. That makes it harder to distribute accurately to songwriters, to understand what parts of their catalogue are likely to do well on TikTok, and to verify that income they receive is a true reflection of their market share.
Blokur is pleased to offer a solution to music publishers that fills the gap and gives them track-by-track detail on the use of their music on TikTok. Very simply, Blokur matches all active music tracks on TikTok to the underlying publishing copyrights and calculates a TikTok market share and a set of writer distribution ratios for each of our publisher clients.
We calculate the market share based on the number of videos created for each track (or total streams if you would like to go one step deeper) and the publisher’s share in each of the underlying songs. We then use the writer shares to calculate how much of a publisher’s usage is attributable to each songwriter so that publishers can distribute royalties appropriately. We can make the results available either through a CSV/Excel report or a dashboard.
And of course, key to Blokur’s ability to perform this analysis accurately is our ability to match recordings to works accurately using our sub graph matching technology, and our comprehensive copyright database, which combines data from many sources to get the most complete view of a work.
If you’d like to learn more about how Blokur can help you with TikTok reporting, just drop us a line at pj [at] blokur [dot] com or phil [at] blokur [dot] com.
We’re looking forward to helping you get the most out of your music on TikTok and helping songwriters get their fair share of the value of music on the platform.
