These TikTok songs earn the most money

While we hear a lot about how streaming on platforms like Spotify is only financially beneficial to a handful of artists, less is known about what TikTok does for an artist’s bottom line. Here we look at a breakdown and comparison of the two.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

Making some real money from streaming seems to only apply to the top 0.1% of artists, and we’ve seen numerous studies that have indicated enormous revenue generated by a handful of artists. That’s on audio streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music though. What about TikTok? Here’s a list of songs that are raking in the royalties right now, but read to the end to better understand why.

Understand that this is the money generated by these artists on Spotify, not TikTok. Here’s why:

• There’s a direct correlation between the number of TikTok plays and the number of Spotify streams. That’s not always the case though, because as you look on down the list there are songs that have hundreds of millions and even billions of TikTok plays, but haven’t generated the same kind of buzz on Spotify.
• You don’t get paid by the number of plays on TikTok. In fact, you get paid by the number of videos that play your song. For instance, a song that has a million plays from 1 video won’t make as much as a song that has 1 million plays from 100 videos.
• We still don’t have a good handle on how much artists are making from TikTok, other than it’s great publicity for the song. As a result, people will go to other streaming services to hear the song in its entirety.

Keep in mind that the chart of TikTok songs above was from the last 6 months of rankings by TikTokBoard. For most of the artists that made the list, that’s a pretty good start to the year.