How are TikTok royalties calculated?

As TikTok continues to grow in popularity and create music stars seemingly overnight, more and more artists are becoming curious about how their royalties are calculated on the platform.

Guest post from Horus Music

As TikTok has become increasingly popular across the globe in recent years, we’re pleased to offer our clients the opportunity to distribute their music to this platform. With the option to set preview times to highlight your catchy chorus for followers to lip sync to, or create trend-worthy dance routines, TikTok’s unprecedented growth over the past few years has led to it becoming a very popular platform providing a great opportunity for you to reach your audience.

The big question a lot of our clients are asking is ‘How are my royalties are calculated from TikTok?’.

In comparison to other major platforms such as Spotify who pay per total number of streams, TikTok operates differently when calculating royalties and base calculations on the number of videos made using your music, as opposed to the number of times the video is watched. This can often become confusing if you are measuring the way royalties are worked out against other stores, so it’s important to understand the main difference here is that big watch numbers don’t equal large royalty payments.

Royalties for TikTok are based on market shares rather than metric views. To calculate the market shares, TikTok use what is called a creation. A creation is when a user selects a release from the Horus Music catalogue from TikTok’s library to make a video. Users can then make their own creations inspired by existing creations, all amounting to new creations. So, to put this simply, every time a user decides to use your music to make a video, this generates a royalty.

With this in mind, when you see your view numbers racking up it’s important to remember what’s generating your royalties is other users selecting your music for their video, not the 200,000 views you may have. When we think back to those Tik Tok classics such as Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘Savage’, the millions of users creating dance videos to the track is a great example of how royalties are generated through a creation.

If you have any questions or queries related to your royalties and in particular TikTok royalties, you can contact the distribution team at alr@hoursmusic.co.uk who are on hand to help.