TikTok is in the process of reinventing itself as both a partner to music companies, and a competitor to streaming and distribution services.
Now, a new market analysis sheds some light on why the ByteDance-owned short video platform has focused so intensely on expanding its services in the music world, with the firm reporting to be a major driver of music consumption and spending.
While that may not come as a surprise to those who’ve noted the overlap between TikTok and music culture, the numbers in the analysis shine a light on the scale of TikTok’s influence.
According to the analysis, commissioned by TikTok and carried out by US market monitor Luminate, 62% of US TikTok users pay for a music streaming service, compared to 43% of all consumers.
To produce TikTok’s new report, which you can read in full here, Luminate researchers studied data from the US, UK, Germany, Brazil and Indonesia, as well as global data, for a 12-month period from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, and found that “compared to average consumers, TikTok users are significantly more likely to be music streamers”.
We know that TikTok counted 150 million users in the United States as of February 2023, which means that, if we look at this stat through the lens of the Luminate analysis, then at this point it appears that approximately 93 million TikTok users in the US are paying for a subscription to one of the various streaming services available in the United States, including Spotify, Apple Music and others.