I Tested If TikTok Views Actually Create Spotify Streams

What percentage of Tik Tok views actually translate to streams on Spotify or streams overall? I was curious and I couldn't find any research online of people showing real numbers. So, I created an experiment. I'm going to walk you through how I set it up, but also we're going to get some real world data for what percentage of streams actually happen based on the number of views we got on Tik Tok. And true [music] selfworth. >> So the first thing I want to do is walk you through how I set up this experiment. And what I realized we needed is basically a sacrificial song that we could only distribute and not market whatsoever except through specific Tik Tok post. So we got a brand new song, released it under a brand new anonymous artist, not tied to my name or any existing artist name. And then no ads, no playlisting, no dedicated social media pages. The only marketing for this song was done through uh basically a network of theme pages that I've been building. So the artist doesn't have socials. It's just posted on these different like variety genrebased theme pages that would share music from that genre. So it's just Tik Tok and there's no growth from the artist. The artist doesn't actually own any resources. And since there's no other way for people to find this song, it means that 100% of all the streams the song is getting is from Tik Tok, right? There's no other way someone could possibly find it unless like they're searching for one song and they accidentally bump into this song, which is going to be very very minimal. Um, there could be algorithmic growth on streaming platforms, but we can track that separately. So, we can guarantee the streams we're getting are from the Tik Tok, which means we can calculate different ratios and and do it. So, I am going to walk you through some Spotify for artist stats, but I want to walk you through a spreadsheet first. I just wanted to show you this so that you know we're going to walk through it so that you don't get bored when we're going through the spreadsheet. So, what I did is I went to Spotify and I pulled the stream count for the song. I don't have Apple Music for Artist access. So, I went to the district bank section and pulled the Apple Music number there. Keep in mind this number is at least a month if not two or 3 months behind. So, the this is definitely higher. Like I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually double. So keep that in mind that the metrics I'm going to show you for the the calculated percentage of of streams later, it's actually most definitely better than this. Never mind that if we look at title and dieser and stuff that we're not counting. YouTube music is plucked from the public YouTube number. So if I go to YouTube music, look up the song, I can see how many plays the song has. Um, and I believe that includes regular YouTube, too. So it's like YouTube and YouTube Music all wrapped up into one number. And then add that up. That gives us a total stream number. Now, you might have heard I just said like the time span here for the Apple. Um, these videos were posted over the span of seven weeks. So, we posted 24 videos over a span of roughly 7 weeks. And so, I started 7 weeks ago. Every few days, I posted a video. Some days I did multiple, then I would just forget about it for a few days. There wasn't really a solid posting strategy. It was kind of chaotic uh just because I had other things going on. This wasn't my only thing in life. So, um, we posted those 24 videos. I added up the videos, all these metrics from today, right? So, I pulled the numbers today. I pulled the view count today, adding up all the views across all those videos. Um, and and the fun thing about this is is none of these videos went viral. Uh, the best perform the average videos was 767 views. And I think the best video only got 1500 views. So, not a single one of these posts went viral, which shows that you really don't need virality to have anything happen. And we can see the kind of magic number here. Um, which is what is the translation to streams. So, uh, first of all, in my opinion, posting 24 videos on social media, this is just Tik Tok, too. I I don't know what'll happen if I post these on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook. I'll talk about that later in the video and what I'm doing next. But um to get 1,400 streams from posting 24 Tik Toks, I was like, that's actually very easy, right? These videos took me less than I don't know, less than an hour to make all of them. So, um, and the other thing, and we'll see this when we get to Spotify, which I'll I guess I'll jump over there real quick, is the if I look at the locations, it's almost all US. And and that's because like I posted from all these Tik Tok accounts from here, my house and I'm in the US. So a lot of Tik Tok stuff is geoargeted. So it's 100% US essentially with a little bit of UK. Um and the demographics all kind of make sense for the genre. By the way, the genre is like I guess heavy metal, new metal, that kind of thing. Um my actual band is is alternative metal, new metal, that kind of thing. And um this more or less lines up with what I see for my band, I'd say. Oh, let me You can't really see the whole thing. More or less this lines up with that. Um there's we have maybe a little bit of a bigger skew from 30 to 44 and smaller from 24. So that's probably the difference of it being all Tik Tok and not like very meta ad heavy like my band is. Um but that's that's the you know kind of awesome, right? And so posting 24 videos and getting eight uh 1456 streams and the streams aren't haven't stopped. Right? If I go back here and we look at overview, um I'm I am still posting for this song because I'm continuing this experiment. But um if you look like uh when I don't post it, it's still like I'm not posting every day. There there's like a tail to this. And one of the most shocking metrics about this is actually the stream per listener. This is insane. This isn't like this is the just whole like catalog stats we're looking at here, but there's only one song distributed for this artist. So, people are finding this song and listening an average of 8.9 times each organically. Like, they're not they're not being told to do anything. And and I I posted um on threads, which if you don't follow me on threads, go follow me on threads about this experiment I was doing. I posted a couple days ago about it. People were like, or one person at least was like, "How are people finding the song? Like, how are you putting a link on TikTok for people to click and jump over? And I'm not. Like, these videos don't have any call to action. They don't say, "Go stream this song." They don't say, "Go stream this song by so and so artist." There's no link. There's no link in bio because the profiles don't have enough followers to have a link in bio. Um, none of the pages that we posted on have more than a couple hundred followers. In fact, a lot of them have under a hundred followers. And people, what I think is happening is people are hearing the song, liking it, and then going to their preferred streaming platform, typing it in, searching it, and so by the time they do that, like they're pretty invested, right? You don't do that for a song unless you're really excited to listen to it. So when they actually get to the streaming platform, the engagement is really high. Um, if I go to source of streams, we can look at active versus algorithmic versus other stuff like that. And you'll see that essentially there's no playlisting, there's no other, and there's no algorithm. So, it's really all active. And we can break up active into these three categories. So, this is people manually searching out the song. So, we're basically looking at every streaming source. The it's really all down to artist profile and catalog and listeners own playlist and library. An artist profile and catalog is the first time someone finds a song and they listen to it from like typing it in or clicking a link to it. in this case, typing it in. Um, listeners on playlist and library means it was saved to either their library or they added to a playlist and they listened from that. And so, uh, a lot of people are doing that. So, most of the streams are actually coming from the the back consumption, meaning they already saved it or playlisted it and they're relisting to the song, which makes sense. I bet if we look at listeners, it's a little more evened out and and it is. it's actually still very skewed towards that which means people are saving it add to playlist and then listening later essentially. Um now this begs the next question is like the stream per listener is amazing and that's actually why the streaming percentages are so amazing. So when we looked at this 5% of the views or 5% of the views on Tik Tok translate to streams on Spotify which I did some math down here that means if we had 100,000 views we're going to get 5,16 streams on Spotify. And then overall, once factoring in Apple Music and YouTube, if we get 100,000 views, we're going to get 7,900 streams across the board. Um, if we look at just listeners though, it's a different story. So, if we look at just listeners on Spotify, we don't have listener data for for Apple or for YouTube. So, I could only do this for Spotify. But the Spotify listener rate is 0.6%. It's just that when they get there, they're listening so damn intently that it ends up being a very, very good metric. This is what I was expecting the stream rate to be. I was expecting to have less than 1% of the views translate to streams. Um, I'm sure some people watching this, hopefully not you, are thinking that 5% that's horrible. I have to go get all this stuff and I get this tiny percentage and 79% that's horrible. In my opinion, that's amazing. Like it's a this is a absurdly I would I really was expecting this number to be less than 1%. I was not expecting five and 7.9 only 7 weeks out. So, and keep in mind if we just wait longer, this number is going to keep rising as people keep relisting, which which is a very it kind of validates that like putting in the work and posting on on TikTok at least is actually worthwhile. Now, I want to go over what I'm doing next. So, the reason why I haven't told you what this song is, what this artist is, because I'm still running this test. I want to see what happens when the song gets enough momentum that it might start triggering algorithmic playlist. I want to see what happens on other platforms once I get an the um the royalty statement in in a couple months for some of these other platforms like title and dieser. And so there's there also what happens when I release a new song under this artist. So I want to experiment with all these things and giving you the name of the artist and song would mean that I can't trust that all the data is anymore just from Tik Tok and just from this experiment. So, if you do, one, don't try to figure it out. Two, if you do find it or come across it, please don't listen to it. Um, or at least don't listen long enough to trigger a stream, but preferably just don't listen at all because you'll corrupt my experiment and I want to keep experimenting with this. But there's also a couple other next steps I want to do because this is one song and I don't know like I brought this up on the My Point four cents podcast, which if you haven't checked that out, that's a podcast with me and some other awesome music industry people, uh, Dustin Bor, Matt Bac, and Jesse Cannon. if if you dig that kind of thing. And and they were like, well, there's only one data point. So, like, how does it work for like country music? How does it work for hip-hop? I was like, well, good point. Like, that's true. This is just one song. Maybe it's different for rock and metal than it is for other genres. So, next thing I'm doing, uh, distributing an electronic song and we're going to test that out. Same kind of thing. And then two, the other most common question I got is how does this work for other social media platforms? So, the next one I'm testing, cuz as you can imagine, this is a lot of work. Like I've been doing this in the background secretly for seven weeks, posting 24 videos and then the tracking and looking at it and getting excited and talking about it. How do I make content about this? So we're doing Instagram next. I think I'm going to do YouTube shorts after that. I think that's all worth a worthwhile experiment because um does the same ratio apply to other genres? Does the same ratio apply to Instagram? So the Instagram test is the same genre as this song so that we can compare as close as possible Tik Tok to Instagram. And then the we have another genre test going on with electronic music to see does it work similarly as good for electronic music as it does for metal. So make sure you subscribe to see those future videos. But I really want to instill the value into you that um this really shows that it doesn't take that much content to significantly move the needle on your song. I am going to be making some videos about how to make content that's less painful because I also don't enjoy making content for music, but I found some great ways to do it in a way that works for my life and for my laziness. So, make sure you subscribe for that and also check out this video to see how you can learn how to run ads to promote your music, which works great with a strategy like posting in social media, but also can kind of compensate if you're not posting as much as you should be. Anyways, thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed. Let me know in the comments and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.