How to Get Famous on TikTok as a Music Artist

How to get famous on TikTok as a music artist depends on more than just talent. You can’t just write great songs and have a pretty face and expect TikTok’s 1 BILLION users to follow you. There’s much more to it than that.

But don’t worry! We’ve done all the research, talked to all the most successful people, and layed out all the how to’s for you right here. And these tips will work for anyone, not just musicians, so stick around if you’re a painter, actor or just want to make money at home using this hot DIY video platform.

No point wasting time, let’s jump in. Getting famous on TikTok as a musician starts for you now!

Get Famous on TikTok as an Artist by Knowing Your Audience

As we said in our YouTube marketing article as well as our getting fans with Spotify article, you need to figure out who’s interested in you already, whose interest you want to grab, and who your music is best suited for in general. If you want to get new fans and keep them, you need to talk to them right. And if you want to talk to them right, you need to know who they are.

This shouldn’t be surprising, and it shouldn’t be much work, either (because you’re already making music with them in mind, of course…) but it’s got to be done before you do anything else.

What are their interests? What do they do? What do they look like? What do they want you to look like? All those things have to be in place for the rest to make sense.

You want to have a niche, a certain thing nobody else is doing but lots of people want. Think of something people will search for and search for it. Is it missing? Can you tell people want it but there’s not enough to go around? That’s a niche you can fill. Those people are your audience.

Get Fans on TikTok with Consistent Posting

You can get fans on TikTok by posting regularly and often. How often should you post? The most important thing is to not go dark, like, ever. If you post once a day and then stop posting for a week, the TikTok algorithm is going to forget you ever happened until it can depend on you. And it does that because that’s what its users do. Would you watch a TV show if it was expected to come out Weds night and then just didn’t come on? Of course not.

But seriously, how often? People will say post once or twice a day, but career TikToker Rachel Pedersen says post 3-7x daily. Does that seem like a lot? It’s what the most popular TikTokers do, so it’s what Pedersen does, so it’s what you should do, too. Next question.

How Long Should TikTok Videos Be?

How long TikTok videos should be is changing. It used to be just seven seconds, and then it moved up to like 10. Now as of 2022, you should be increasing the length of your videos to about 13 secs so you don’t freak out your existing followers, but you want to keep increasing until you’re at about 20 secs. We’ll probably see this grow, too, just as we saw Twitter start with about 34 characters and grow to 85. Blog posts went from 300 words to 1200-2500 words. And Instagram went from having minimal text to having words all over the place, too.

Tl;dr: 20 secs or even a little more.

Get Famous on TikTok for Music with Hashtags and Key Terms

Get famous on TikTok for music using good hashtags and key terms, and lots of them. Use as many hashtags as you can both in your caption and in the hashtags list. Caption hashtags are heavily weighted. These need to be in your niche and not overused on TikTok by other people already, but not so innovative that nobody else is going to look for it or use it at all.

Work your way up to more popular hashtags. Using #fyp and #foryourpage does nothing for you until you’re already performing to a huge audience using #nichehashtags used by far fewer people. That’s how you can begin to stand out.

Be an Active Part of the TikTok Community

Be Active as a Viewer

Scroll through your page and find TikToks relevant to your own material and comment on those videos. One of those could go viral, and then there’s your comment garnering hundreds of likes and translating into scores of followers. Comment on vids you think are funny, smart or just plain cool, too. In other words, be part of the community.

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Do Trends and Challenges

Do trends and challenges between your original content material. Scroll through your page and find trends and challenges you think are interesting, then drop your own TikToks with a personal spin on them. That’s how you’re going to become fashionable in the TikTok world. 

TikTok is a community based on fads. Don’t try to fight it. Ride the wave.

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Get Famous on TikTok for Music through Trends and Features

Get famous on TikTok in music by knowing trends and acting on them. The reason people do well on TikTok is because they’re very good at learning about trends, surfing on those waves and taking advantage of what’s hot right now. That’s the whole thing.

But how do you know what the TikTok trends are?

• To find what trends are happening, scroll through your page and watch/listen to the vids there. You’re going to see a *lot* of similar stuff. The thing that you see over and over and over again? That’s the trend right now. Do that.

• To find what’s trending in your niche, do searches for related material. Search #tiktokhiphop or #newpunkrock or #synthpop2022 or whatever. Be creative. Find your people. Then scroll through all those vids and see what they’re up to. That’s the sort of targeted art you need to be making for TikTok to get your following up.

• Stay up to date with new TikTok features and use them like mad. As of this time of writing, the new features are green-screen brush, sun glow, gentle glow, and TikToks with lots of text. To use green screen brush, start with a hook that invokes lots of curiosity, then start to swipe away and you’ll see the green screen start to show up. For text, make sure your text has a clear connection to your hook, and also ensure the text has lots of contrast between the letters and the video. Don’t make people squint. Don’t let text get blocked by the description or the follow button. 

When you get a handle on learning what trends are and following them, your following will grow exponentially, and you’ll see it happening right away. Make sure to keep watching for the next new thing! Don’t sleep!

Get Famous on TikTok for Music with Reaction and Unboxing

You can increase your TikTok followers by simply doing reaction vids and unboxing vids. Does that sound silly? It’s true. The more TikToks you have of yourself reacting big to things, the bigger your following will be. It’s just a fact of the platform. Ditto unboxing vids.

Do unboxing and reaction videos to things in your niche. Get the new album by that one guy. Get a piece of merch. When these items come to your door, open them up and react on TikTok. (Do a separate video for each, of course).

Make sure to use hashtags for the source of the material. Presumably you’re going to get this stuff anyway (you don’t need to buy things just to unbox and react to them) so just increase your followers by televising it.

And if you already have pretty big fans, get them to do unboxing videos of your albums, singles, and merch, themselves. Have them do reaction videos. These are the things people watch on TikTok.

Get Famous on TikTok as a Musician by Making Useful Sounds

Get famous on TikTok by making sounds which will help other people get famous. That’s how sounds go viral on TikTok. Make a bit of original music which aids in the whole TikTok thing. It needs to be specifically excellent for the TikTok medium.

Look at what’s being used on TikTok now. Make sounds like that with your own little spin on them. People can learn about the rest of your material later. Get famous first.

Make a Great TikTok Video Checklist

To make a great TikTok video, you can use this checklist suggested by social-media marketing pro Robert Benjamin.

1) Make sure there’s an audience for your video

2) Add a hook to your video

3) Add hashtags and keywords to your description and title

4) Have a Call to Action in your video

5) Post at the right time of day (6am-10am and 7pm-11pm)

6) Make videos the right length (13-20 secs)

And that’s it. If you’re doing all that, your videos are going to be leagues ahead of whatever your competition is doing. ‘Nuff said.

How to Get Famous on TikTok as an Artist: All of the Above!

And that’s it! If you’ve read all the way to here and you’re doing all of the above, then it is simply a matter of time before you are a TikTok user with hundreds of thousands of followers, and that’s just the beginning.

Hope we were able to help! And don’t forget, when you’re ready for some professional music press and top-shelf independent music distribution, we can help with both those things ASAP for prices literally everyone can afford, too. Also don’t miss out on all the other helpful music DIY articles hosted right here.

Thanks for reading! And have fun getting your music heard on TikTok!