TikTok Partners With Billboard on Recent Trending Track Listing

TikTok’s trying to further solidify its reference to the music industry, via a latest partnership with Billboard on an official “TikTok Billboard Top 50 Chart”.

The brand new, weekly chart will highlight the highest trending songs on the platform within the U.S., and can further underline TikTok’s importance as a driver of music interest, and a key platform for music promotion and distribution.

As per TikTok:

“The TikTok Billboard Top 50 Chart is the primary official chart within the U.S. to watch music discovery and engagement on the platform. It’s the verified list of the most popular songs on TikTok each week, giving essentially the most accurate record of the present music trends happening within the U.S. market. The chart relies on a mixture of creations, video views, and user engagement by the U.S. TikTok community, and shall be released weekly on Thursdays.”

TikTok has fast grow to be an essential consideration for record labels and artists, as a consequence of its capability to spark high-volume music trends, that may quickly make a track the essential hit of the moment.

Indeed, TikTok is now so influential that various artists and publishers are creating tracks with TikTok in mind, with some even changing the names of their songs looking back to higher align with in-app usage. 

In keeping with a study published in 2021 by MRC Data, 75% of TikTok users, at the moment, were using the app to find latest artists, while 63% indicated that they hear music they’ve never heard before for the primary time via TikTok clips. Given TikTok’s growth since then, you possibly can only imagine that these percentages at the moment are even higher, making it a more influential driver of music trends.

It is smart, then, for TikTok to further solidify its music industry connection, while also helping to further promote artists that make TikTok hits.

I mean, the one concern here is that this can further incentivize music based on TikTok trends. Which is probably not a nasty thing, however it may lead to more artists trying to create key snippets for sampling, which could impact the creation process.

Possibly, I don’t know, possibly artists don’t consider it to that degree. But with TikTok driving billions of views based on music, my guess is that not less than some within the record industry try to map out what sorts of clips and lyrics inside a track will work best for TikTok clips.  

Either way, it makes perfect sense for TikTok to partner with Billboard on this latest track listing, as a promotional vehicle for TikTok itself, and a way for Billboard to remain connected to key culture drivers.

It’ll be interesting, also, to see how the TikTok chart compares with Billboard’s regular top track listings.