Inside Stories: Turning Your Songs Into Viral Sounds On TikTok Is Easier Than You Think
Itai Winter explained us why is TikTok so successful and how to use this efficiently as a musician
In case you haven’t noticed by now, there’s a new king in the online kingdom of entertainment. A king that gave every single user the power to become viral overnight, regardless the followers’ count. A king that likes to be fed with short video content. A king that doesn’t care about your social bubble. A king that knows pretty well what you’d enjoy watching, while getting past your digital hypocrisy 🫣
Yes, we are talking about TikTok and its massive impact it had on the way we consume internet in past few years. Names like Lil Nas X, Doja Cat or Olivia Rodrigo raised their status to international fandom solely on TikTok. So it’s pretty obvious that many artists focus nowadays on promoting their music on the Chinese social media platform, hoping for that breakthrough in their career.
Easier said than done, guys! Even if it’s pure luck and a platinum plated song, it still needs a bit of science and know-how. You need someone who knows all the nuts and bolts of promoting artists and their music on TikTok.
Meet Itai Winter, owner of PushTok. In short, PushTok is a tech and marketing company that worked with hundreds of artists: from major artists like J Balvin, DJ Khaled & Kid Cudi to your everyday indie musician. What PushTok does is simple, at least in theory: boost your own content or promote your sounds through their extensive network of influencers.
So, long story short, we had a nice chat with Itai about how to get viral on TikTok, how to create relevant content on this platform, where you should drive most of your marketing budget.
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Hi Itai, thank you for accepting our invitation. How are you?
I’m great. Thanks so much for having me. It’s the holiday season here in Nashville, so we have a lot of holiday parties.
Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you end up with doing tiktok marketing for the music industry?
I was working as an agent for musicians, but I’ve always had a passion to help artists promote their music and themselves. And then in 2018, I started working at a company where everybody was a former Musically influencer, currently a TikTok influencer. I immediately thought this is a huge opportunity and a huge moment in the music industry that something new is growing. And it’s not just in the music industry. It’s a complete shift in the way people consume media. And I’m not saying social media because TikTok is not social media. It’s a content discovery platform. In that sense, I started thinking about TikTok in a different light. How do I integrate this into social media efforts? I started coming up with different ideas of how to promote an artist here… figuring out how a TikTok tool will look like. Found a partner who helped me out a lot with building these tech tools so we this is how we started PushTok.
Like you said, we live a big shift in how we’re using the internet…
It’s not just like how you discover music, it’s how you overall get exposed to new content. The issue with Instagram and Facebook was that they were an echo chamber of the people around you and you had a very hard time like punching through. If you’re surrounded by, let’s say, conservative friends. You’ll only hear conservative thoughts. If you’re surrounded by ultra progressive friends, you only hear ultra-progressive thoughts. And with TikTok, you just start seeing stuff from all over the world that the algorithm thinks you’re gonna like because, guess what, other people responded positively to it and they profiled you in a certain way that they think maybe you’re similar to those people and that provides a huge opportunity for artists to get discovered by people. With Meta platforms, it’s mostly people that you actively subscribed to, while TikTok is just “Hey, here’s a bunch of stuff. We think you’re gonna like it”.
What does matter most when creating content for TikTok?
Number one: context is king! Figuring out the context of the platform and then learning how to contextualize yourself as an artist on the platform. That’s the most important part: how to tell your story and how to explain your brand identity or the very concise context of a certain video on tiktok. It can be something as simple as asking a question that immediately creates a context for you and your song. You have to make it super digestible for new audiences, unlike instagram where people know you and opted in to see your content.
After that, I think that artists are not putting a lot of care into systemising and templating their content. I guarantee anyone can produce a video per day. But it gets super difficult. You erode really quickly. You’re an artist, I’m not trying to turn you into a TikToker. Your goal shouldn’t be to become a successful Tiktoker. Your goal is to be an artist that uses the platform. Use TikTok in a way that’s beneficial to you. And one of the beneficial things that you can do is produce content ahead of time. Batch it. Build systems to create content in a way that’s sustainable to you. If you just chase content creation, you’re gonna burn out eventually.
If you put good content in front of people, eventually they’re going to respond. It might take 10 videos, it might take 100 videos. But eventually people are going to respond to it and, if your music is good, they’re gonna fall in love with you. And that’s really all it is. Gathering a few hundred fans here, 50 fans there. Maybe some people that watch this, maybe some people that watch that and all of a sudden you have five, six, seven, eight, 10,000 fans. 10,000 people that really care about you. Maybe only a tenth of them buy your merchandise. That’s still 1,000 people that bought your merchandise. That’s a lot of people.
Is it a special recipe for the music to become viral on tiktok?
Virality is a moving target. For me, viral is hitting over 20,000 views because I have a small music marketing account. For someone else, hitting less than 100K views is nothing. For Lauren Gray, who has 56 million followers, if she gets less than 1 million views on her tiktok, that’s kind of a fail for her. So, I think that you need to define what viral is to you. And you need to define success. What are your benchmarks on that? 1000 sound usages? 15,000? For this, you would need a big budget, starting at 5K at least. Your sound is great, but there’s also thousands of other sounds. Some of them by big artists that their labels are paying tens of thousands of dollars to influencers to blow up those sounds. Yet someone can definitely become successful with the right tools: PushTok, Zebr, PearPop.
Can you give us an example of a TikTok campaign that turned into a success story for the artist you worked for?
Games We Play is a great example - their content is authentic, raw and leans on 2 things - authentic expression and banging music. Being able to understand the culture on the platform and turn it into content relevant to their music. This led to them signing with a subsidiary of WMG, topping the viral 50 charts for 6 weeks and gaining hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners in a short span of time. Check these videos 👇
You have a 5K budget to promote your music on TikTok. How do you efficiently split your budget between content, ads and influencer marketing?
From my point of view, a 5K budget is minimum for influencer marketing. If your entire budget for TikTok is 5K, I would focus it on two things: creating really cool content (spend from 1,000 to 1,500). The rest of the money I would use for targeted ads on TikTok.
One artist we should follow on TikTok
One cool artist you discovered on TikTok
Your favourite playlist on Spotify
Depends on the day, for now it’s this one 👇