Happy 2024! We are thrilled to be back with the fourth installation of our How to Go Viral With Your Music series. With the start of a brand new year, we welcome a fresh wave of trends and content to kick off your year on the right note. If you haven’t already, you can check out Part 1 (Finding Your Niche edition), Part 2 (Collaboration edition), and Part 3 (Christmas edition) for more viral tips and tricks. This month, series writer and artist Maya Malkin takes us back to the basics. Let’s get right into it!
Building Awareness
Two weeks ago, I was flying home to Toronto from LA. Sitting next to me was a full-time content creator and TikToker who wished to remain anonymous. We got to chatting on the 5-and-a-half-hour flight, and she had plenty of tips on how to build a TikTok audience. Her number one pointer was to use trending sounds. She said that when people didn’t know who she was yet on the platform, using a trending sound really helped bring people who would have never found her otherwise to her page. This may seem like an obvious tip, but sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the content creation hamster wheel and forget the simple tricks that this app built itself off of. So, hit the “Tiktok Viral” sounds page, find some trending sounds, and try them out!
Current trending sounds I keep seeing on my FYP are “Never Lose Me,” “Murder On The Dancefloor,” “My Love Mine All Mine,” and “Little Life.” Some content ideas could be to use one of these songs in a video with text highlighting your own music, for example, “If you like this song, you might like my music,” or something related to the music industry like “when you get dropped from your record label, so now you’re trying to go viral on TikTok.” You can also create your own cover version of the trending sound and include the original sound in your video at 0 volume, so your video still appears under the sound. Each sound has multiple unique trends attached to it, so go check them out on TikTok, see what some of the trends are, and try one!
2024 Trends to Try
Take advantage of TikTok Effects and Filters
This year is all about going back to the basics and leaning into what TikTok, as an app, wants you as a user to do, and using that to your advantage. Similar to popular sounds, filters and effects on TikTok trend and get you more traction and views simply by using them. You can take advantage of trending ones that are directly related to music, like the autotune filter, and use it to cover a well-known song or simply add a trending beauty, funny, or interesting filter as a really simple technique for more organic reach.
Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and have fun with the effects. There was a period in time when the “Shrek is love” filter was trending. It has since been used over 6 million times. There is a major opportunity to get eyes on your page with a trending effect, no matter how silly it is. Why not serenade Shrek with an original song? Or dance with him while you blast a new release on the overhead speakers? TikTok is all about personality, so try to see the opportunities in even the most light-hearted of trends.
Go LIVE!
2024 is the year of going live. This was another pointer I got from the full-time TikToker on the plane, and a few content creator friends of mine had already echoed the sentiment previously. Word on the street is that TikTok is pushing live content – hard. For example, user Kayla Summer has only posted 93 TikTok videos as of January 2024, most of which average around 1-2k views, but she has amassed 12k followers by going live and singing regularly.
There are plenty of ways to get creative with the live format. Danny Rakow, manager of acts like Jeremy Zucker and Brakence goes live on TikTok with a “pitch your song” series, where artists are encouraged to submit their songs via the live chat. He will select a queue of the submitted songs and let the audience vote on whether they like it or not via an emoji poll. This is a great way to get lots of engagement with comments in the live chat and audience interaction via voting and feedback. He also encourages people to follow him if their song isn’t selected so they can try again next time, which is a great way to keep followers looking out for your next live.
Other ways to get creative on LIVE include doing live DJ sets like Cale Hal and @ViTA, letting your own songs play over the speaker and performing or dancing to them like Mark Hester Power, or if you’re into more ambient sound creation, you could check outthe world of ASMR like Amanda J ASMR. Whatever your interest may be, there is a market for it on TikTok LIVE.
Post More Live Performance Content
Continuing on the theme of going back to the basics, the reason we got into this industry to begin with is simple: we love music. We are all music lovers in some capacity. Share more of your stripped-back raw talent – whatever makes you and what you do special. Social media users are just people like the rest of us and love to discover cool new artists.. Musicians like Benson Boone, Jensen McRae, and Laci Kaye Booth are capturing audiences through heartfelt and intimate live performances online. The Crowe Boys have gained a whopping 204.7k followers and 11.5 million views from their viral live performance of a song about “wishing the government wouldn’t take away all their money.” Heck, even Jesse McCartney is hopping on the live singing content train with his latest performance in Anthony Gargiula’s post! This year, let’s try hiding less behind creative edits, and let people see us in a more vulnerable way.
If you’re just getting started as a content or music creator, or trying to grow your platform, building awareness of who you are and what you do is so important. Your audience wants to understand your personality and can learn a lot about who you are just from your take on the latest trend. So hop on a trending sound, effect, or filter and put your unique spin on it, or go live and get to know other users in real time. It can be super fun and rewarding to come up with crazy concepts and go big with your content, but bringing things back to basics and creating simple content can also reap major rewards.
In 2024, let’s contrast all the extravagance and maximalism that we’ve been putting into our content creation with some simplicity. After all, we have to avoid burnout somehow! Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for future installments of our How To Go Viral series. RAC wishes you the best of luck with your new year content!
For more tips, check out Part 1 (Finding Your Niche edition), Part 2 (Collaboration edition), and Part 3 (Christmas edition).
Written by Maya Malkin
Illustration by Holly Li
