TikTok Content Ideas for Musicians

It's no secret that TikTok is now the best place to boost your brand and grow your audience. Thanks to a huge number of active users, constantly changing trends, and the engaging format of a never-ending short video carousel, TikTok has become the perfect marketing platform for people of all backgrounds and professions, from artists and historians to therapists and deep cleaning specialists.

Whether you're starting TikTok from scratch or have been using the social network for a while, it never hurts to learn new tricks that will help make your account more interesting, increase your views, and grow your audience.

This article focuses on TikTok content tips geared towards musicians. If you want to learn how to grow your TikTok fan following and get your music discovered by thousands of potential new listeners, keep reading.

Prepare Content Buckets

It’s an essential part of any content marketing strategy, regardless of your occupation and the social media platform of choice. Content buckets are different content categories that appeal to your target audience, and align with your goals. Identifying specific categories and basing your strategy on them is what’s going to help you avoid getting stuck on what to post.

Some of the standard content buckets are educational, entertainment, promotional, engagement, testimonial, facts, and figure-based posts. You are free to use these or create the ones that suit your artistry and interests best – it could be literally anything! Select 5 to 10 buckets and you will never be short on content ideas.

Collaborate with Others

One of the most effective ways to develop your account as a musician on TikTok is collaborating with other creators through duets. A TikTok duet is two videos by two creators playing at the same time on a split screen. Post a video and invite others to collaborate, for example, you may upload a video featuring your beat and ask others to sing over it, dance to it, or add something else new to the original.

Since any collaborator leads directly back to your video, duets have a huge potential to go viral. But even if a duet doesn’t bring millions of views and likes, it still exposes you to new audiences. You’re also free to hop on somebody else’s video as a collaborator – TikTok algorithms favor such activity and push your duet to more users that can ultimately become your followers.

Hop On Trends

Like it or not, trends are the heart of TikTok. Seamless transitions, dancing, lipsyncing and various challenges attract a lot of attention, help the participants get discovered and grow larger audiences. Trends are fleeting but they proved to be extremely effective marketing-wise. Because of that, you should always keep your eye on what’s hot on TikTok at the moment and join the trend that matches your brand and ability.

If you think that TikTok trends are fads and doing silly dances on camera is embarrassing, know that you don’t actually have to do all that. You may just use a trending sound in your video and display something that you actually like. Don’t devote your entire account to videos with trending sounds, the main focus should be on your original music. But consider incorporating popular songs and sounds into some of your content, it pays dividends.

Perform Your Song In Different Styles

Another popular type of content on TikTok is "Song In Different Styles." Musicians perform songs from well-known movies, video games, ads, and music by other musicians and their own songs in several different styles.

We recommend doing this style play with other artists' songs and yours alike. This way you will lure those who want to see a different spin on something they already know and push your music to the masses. What's more, it's a great way to showcase your talent, versatility and creativity.

Firstly, perform a part of a song in its original style, then switch to heavy metal, EDM, hip hop, etc. In addition to broad genres you may try performing in styles of specific bands and artists like Metallica, Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, you name it. Take your inspiration from creators from TikTok and other platforms who already successfully do this thing, for example, Anthony Vincent. Don't be afraid to go all the way – imitate not only a music style of a musician but also their looks.

Create Cover Songs

Cover songs have been helping musicians build their fanbases for decades. Covers also make up a good portion of the most shared content on TikTok. Putting the two and two together, covers are a must in your marketing strategy. Just like the “song in different styles” trend, covers provide the opportunity to grab the attention with a familiar song and share your unique sound and production style.

Thanks to TikTok being the short-form video platform, you don’t have to record a cover in its entirety. Select just one impactful and catchy part of a popular song and recreate it.

Break Down Your Songs

Simply adding your song into a TikTok video or making a clip announcing that your new track is out on streaming platforms is a classic but obvious move. If you want to promote your music in a more subtle and creative way, make videos where you deconstruct your songs.

Break it down layer by layer from the initial idea to how you introduced each of the elements, all the way to the final piece. This way you create a journey for the viewers, lift the veil on your music production process, and maybe even educate and inspire other artists on TikTok.

Post Your Demo vs. Final Song

Before vs. After content does well in any niche. People love seeing fatloss and glowup photos, cleaning videos, and first to final drafts comparison in any form, the same goes for music.

We experience satisfaction when we see and hear something raw and flawed being developed and perfected. It’s smart to use this in your marketing strategy – give your TikTok viewers the satisfaction of seeing how far you’ve come as a musician, writer and producer.

Demo vs. Final Song is another example of how you can promote your music without outright saying “hey guys please listen to my song.” Seeing the way your track changed from bare bones to a finished product is more interesting than just listening to the final result.

There are a lot of proven marketing tactics you can use to boost your following count. However, you shouldn’t forget that first and foremost TikTok is a social media platform, so communicating with others and being your authentic self is the most important thing.

Reply to comments (maybe even on camera), host a Q&A session, and interact with other musicians' content. Share what you know and what you love with others: make tutorials, let people know how you choose your reference tracks, show your favorite albums, and give links to playlists of songs you listen to on repeat. The more passionate and active you are, the more engagement and genuine fans you get.

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