A lot has been written in recent weeks about the battle between TikTok and independent labels over the platform’s impending expiration of its Merlin licensing deal.
In case you missed it, TikTok recently scrapped re-licensing discussions with Merlin, blaming “operational challenges with Merlin in the past where music that is not quality controlled for copyright is delivered”.
Their deal officially expired last month (October 31), with many prominent indie distro companies, including UnitedMasters and Ditto Music, inking direct deals with ByteDance.
But there’s another, much quieter tussle taking place on global charts: TikTok’s SoundOn service vs. the ‘establishment’ record industry.
Back in 2022, MBW asked if TikTok was slowly turning into a record company after the ByteDance-owned platform launched its SoundOn distro service, and started hiring for A&R executives with record label experience.
Just the other week, one of those A&R executives, Josh Mateer – who joined TikTok in 2022 after eight years in A&R at Warner Music Group – was promoted to a key role as Head of A&R at SoundOn, TikTok in the UK and Europe.
Within the LinkedIn post announcing his promotion, Mateer highlighted various recent achievements from SoundOn artists.
One of those achievements: a recent No.1 position on Spotify‘s Global Daily Viral chart with the Charlie Jeer single Her Eyes.
In a very label-like announcement, accompanied by a signing photo with the TikTok/SoundOn team posted to Instagram, UK-based Charlie Jeer revealed that he had signed a deal with TikTok’s distribution company earlier in October.
Her Eyes is still a viral hit in multiple markets, currently at No.41 on Spotify’s Global Daily Viral chart and No.40 on the Daily Viral chart in the Netherlands, having previously hit No.1 on the chart in the market.
Her Eyes is also currently No.56 on Spotify’s Daily Viral chart in Germany (also peaked at No.1 there). It also hit No.1 on the same chart in Poland, and is currently sitting at No.76 there.
SoundOn-backed artists aren’t only scoring viral hits on music streaming platforms; they’re also achieving hits on official charts in some of the world’s largest recorded music markets.
TikTok’s Josh Mateer, in his LinkedIn post, pointed to SoundOn “working closely” with breakout UK artist LeoStayTrill on the release of his viral hit, Pink Lemonade.
LeoStayTrill’s track hit No.56 on the Official UK Singles chart, has been playlisted at various UK radio stations and entered the Spotify Top 200 charts across various markets globally.
MBW understands that LeoStayTrill has amassed over 100 million global chart-eligible streams during his initial releases with SoundOn since May 2024.
He currently has over 3.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, up from around 200,000 monthly listeners prior to working with SoundOn earlier this year.
The Pink Lemonade music video has also racked up over 5.3 million views on YouTube:
Another recent success for SoundOn came in the form of a collaboration with music discovery platform Mixtape Madness and creative consultancy Groundworks to bring UK hip-hop stars M Huncho and Potter Payper together for a joint album titled, 36 Hours.
According to TikTok’s Josh Mateer, the release marked SoundOn’s inaugural album project as a distributor.
The album debuted at No.28 on the Official UK Album Chart, following its release in May, and MBW understands that it has racked up 50 million-plus streams across all platforms since then.
SoundOn scored the cover and No.1 spot on Spotify’s New Music Friday UK playlist for M Huncho and Potter Payper during the campaign, and also directed marketing support towards physical billboards in London, like this one in partnership with ad agency Diabolical.
Starting to sound like a record label yet?
Elsewhere, SoundOn achieved a UK Top 40 single in May with Craig David & Wes Nelson’s Abracadabra. Plus, according to Josh Mateer, “mere months” into SoundOn’s 2022 launch, it was “instrumental” in driving Sidemen’s Christmas Drillings to No.3 in the UK Singles chart during Week leading up to Christmas.
Mateer also said that the SoundOn platform achieved its first International chart position recently, with Niklas Dee’s Around the World, which hit the Top 20 in Germany, the world’s fourth-largest recorded music market.
Evidence of SoundOn’s chart success follows the news that TikTok is forming an investment team focusing on “partnership or acquisition opportunities in the music content space on a global level”.
TikTok recently appointed a Head of Global Music Content Strategy & Investments who is leading the recruitment drive for this team.
We suggested in June, when we broke the news about TikTok’s music M&A play, that one of various potential strategies behind the move is an evolution of its SoundOn distro service.
How so? The company might want a larger slice of the music recorded by the artists discovered, developed, and marketed by SoundOn.
That could be especially true if SoundOn regularly sees these artists go viral (as the achievements above suggest is already happening) and then sign to major record companies based on their initial success via SoundOn.
“The existence of SoundOn and the resources invested by the platform to drive artist success stories have drastically changed the dynamics between TikTok and the record labels to which it previously shouted about acting as a talent funnel.”
The exact number of artists signing deals with major labels after achieving viral success on the TikTok platform or via other DSPs distributed via SoundOn is difficult to quantify.
Back in December 2020, two years before SoundOn existed, TikTok revealed that over 70 artists that broke on the platform that year had signed major label deals.
The existence of SoundOn and the resources invested by the platform to drive artist success stories have drastically changed the dynamics between TikTok and the record labels to which it previously shouted about acting as a talent funnel.
Via the new investment strategy we first told you about in June, could TikTok offer an emerging independent artist a deal for a stake in (or full ownership of) their catalog way before any of the majors get a chance, effectively cutting off the funnel?
And after TikTok’s hypothetical investment in an artist’s music, what would stop the platform from prioritizing the promotion of its owned content?
As we noted in June, TikTok has a tightrope to walk between promoting SoundOn artists and the promotion of major label-signed music… in order to avoid the kind of public fallout we saw between TikTok and Universal Music Group earlier this year.Music Business Worldwide