Music

Artists that are raking it on TikTok $$$

TikTok has become the most effective platform for artists to showcase their music. The huge social media marvel – offers endless hours of short user-generated video clips. So naturally, music is a big part of these. TikTok users use music, whether as background soundtracks for their videos or essential parts of memes. Therefore this has become a huge platform for artists. But how much are these artists really making from their viral songs?

Here’s a look at the most played songs on TikTok

“Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”- by Kevin MacLeod is the most played song with 31,612,975,915 plays.
“Oh No” by Kreepa is the second most played with 30,406,767266 plays.
“Steven Universe” by L.Dre being the third most played is on 10,681,174,626 plays.

Monkeys Spinning Monkeys and Steven Universe are both popular songs to use for your background music for a TikTok video. “Oh No” is the popular funny meme that captures the moments right before disaster strikes.

The shocker is there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between these TikTok plays and revenue. For instance, “Oh No,” the No.2 most played song on TikTok, has earned $114,933 in Spotify earnings, but the No.1 most played song “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys,” earning even lower, relatively small $14,577 from Spotify. On the other hand, Doja Cat ft Sza’s “Kiss Me More” song is number 4 on the Top 10 Most Played songs, with a payout of about $1,976,048.

Let’s look at the 3 highest-earning songs from TikTok.

“Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” by Lil Nas X – has earned the highest $2,992,743
“Astronaut in the Ocean” by Masked Wolf is sitting close with $2,693,099
And “Good 4 U” by Olivia Rodrigo closes the top 3 with $2,275,954

Again there isn’t a correlation between the earnings and the TikTok plays. For example, “Good 4 U” ranks at No.3 in top earners only has 965,217,397 plays on TikTok, yet its earnings surpass “Oh No” by Kreepa, which ranks No.2 in most played. WhistleOut.com made this discovery, which calculated earnings by multiplying each song’s number of plays on Spotify by the average pay-out per stream as according to Forbes.

TikTok is now just another platform for artists to create revenue for themselves; however, with digital media taking over, artists might have to adjust and make music that is usable and relatable to the young and old generation, as platforms like TikTok are user friendly to the old generation of content creators too. There are artists who have managed to cater to the market as well as benchmark and set the blueprint with billions of plays of their songs on TikTok, like Cardi B, Doja Cat, Sza, and Megan Thee Stallion, and even though they are quite new in the music scene, they are coining it! We hope to see more female artists on this list.

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Namhla Lebona

Namhla Lebona writes articles about fashion, lifestyle, and beauty. She has written articles for corporations such as Nike, HP, and The North Face under MEFeater Magazine. Her articles have been published across the United States, Nigeria, and South Africa. Before she started writing, Namhla got a Travel Agency and Operations diploma from the Tshwane University of Technology. After that, to shake things up, she went to fashion school at TUT Arts, where she graduated with a diploma in Fashion Design & Technology. She has worked in industries such as fashion and marketing. She now writes full-time.