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Business News Deals Digital
TikTok adds music distribution via UnitedMasters partnership
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 18 August 2020
TikTok has announced an alliance with music distributor UnitedMasters which will allow music-makers to upload full tracks through the popular video-sharing app, getting said tracks into TikTok’s own music library and onto all the other music streaming services. You know, if they want to.
By integrating the TikTok app with UnitedMaster’s distribution service, the former is expanding the tools it offers content creators, much like many of its competitors – indeed, on the audio side, SoundCloud already has an option to push music uploaded to its platform onto other services.
For UnitedMasters, its a way of getting its DIY distribution products in front of a whole new community of grassroots creators.
Says UnitedMasters boss Steve Stoute: “If you are a musical artist, TikTok is the best place for your music to go viral and UnitedMasters is the best place to sustain it while retaining full ownership of your work. By combining the two, we create the platform for tomorrow’s stars who will be famous, fiercely independent and wealthy”.
Adds TikTok’s music chief Ole Obermann: “TikTok artists who are creating music in their bedrooms today will be featured in the Billboard charts tomorrow. Our mission is to help those artists achieve their creative potential and success. This partnership with UnitedMasters gives us a turn-key solution to help artists who are born on TikTok to reach their fans on every music service”.
Launched in 2017, at its core UnitedMasters is a DIY distributor like Ditto, CD Baby, Distrokid and TuneCore. Though – as with many of its competitors in that somewhat crowded marketplace – it also offers some other services for artists beyond pure distribution, making a particularly big deal about its brand partnership capabilities.
As for distribution, the firm currently offers two options, a free level with distribution to key services in return for a 10% commission, and a premium level that gets music onto a plethora of services and hands over 100% of subsequent royalties to the creator. Both will be available to music-makers who access the service via TikTok.
