TikTok has officially entered the music distribution market with a new service named SoundOn, which was announced last Wednesday (March 8).
Artists can post their songs directly to TikTok and RESSO, and TikTok's distribution service can also distribute their music to platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
The platform is available in the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, and Indonesia.
TikTok has now confirmed to MBW that Believe-owned digital distribution platform TuneCore has been picked as its distribution partner for SoundOn.
In short, this means that artists who upload their music to TikTok SoundOn will then have that music distributed to other platforms (Spotify, Apple Music etc.) via TuneCore.TuneCore has been the service’s distribution partner, we’re told, since SoundOn quietly launched in beta in September last year.
Before SoundOn existed, TikTok had a different distribution partner: independent artist distribution platform UnitedMasters, which struck a deal with TikTok in August 2020.That deal is no longer in place, we’re told, but UnitedMasters has been picked as one of TikTok’s six ‘certified Sound Partners’.
As revealed in October, this ‘Sound Partner’ agreement lets brands leverage music distributed by UnitedMasters for mini-syncs on the TikTok platform.
