After TikTok\, who’ll be the next ‘Lamberghini’ of music promos?
MUMBAI: The clock on after effects of the TikTok ban keeps ticking – while gainers include TikTok stars, who are getting poached by rival platforms, among losers are regional music labels that have taken a 25-30% revenue hit.
These music labels said a song usually saw 20-30% increase in its traffic on YouTube and music-streaming platforms after it had gone viral on TikTok, thus boosting earnings. The ban on TikTok has made song promotion expensive for many music labels as the app was able to yield a tenfold impact on views for half the budget set aside for YouTube, said leading regional music labels.
On an average, a music label spends between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 40 lakh in promoting a non-film soundtrack across TV, radio and digital platforms. In fact, while traditional advertisers were wary of spending on TikTok, many music labels spent almost 35% of their marketing budget on the short video app. Post-TikTok, some labels are thinking of checking out the efficacy of other apps by spending around a third of their TikTok budget on these new platforms.
On TikTok, music studios roped in popular content creators to use audio clips from their song in their 15-30 second videos. If the track caught users’ fancy, these TikTok stars would include it in videos, giving the song free publicity.
“Older and relatively unpopular songs also found traction on TikTok leading to a trickle effect on their YouTube views and streaming numbers,” said Mandar Thakur, COO, Times Music, owned by the Times Group, which also owns this newspaper.
Thakur cites examples of Punjabi songs like “Lamberghini” and “Tera Ghata” that revived a year after release purely on the back of their popularity on TikTok.
Close to a hundred non-film songs have been released by the Punjabi, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Tamil and Telugu music industry in the two months since the ban. “A song with the potential of fetching 20 million hits across platforms is now getting only 2 million hits because of lack of TikTok's marketing channel,” said Anup Kumar, CEO of Mohali-based music label Acme Muzic that has over 1.4 million subscribers on its YouTube channel.