Team Talk is Music Ally’s weekly interview series, where our marketing experts speak to music industry teams about their latest work, best practices, and smart strategies. You can find the archive here.
If you’d asked Music Ally which artists would be mentioned in a conversation with TikTok UK’s music partnerships manager, Travis wouldn’t have been high on our list.
That’s no disrespect meant to the Scottish group. They’re great! But they emerged in the mid-1990s; the band members are all in their fifties; and they’re a rock band. None of which, so received wisdom goes, is a recipe for TikTok success.
That’s the thing about received wisdom: it’s not always wise. Sheema Siddiqi’s job at TikTok is to help the full gamut of artists make the most of the platform. Travis included.
“They are going on tour with The Killers, and they wanted to get more into TikTok because they’ve had new fans discover their music on platform. They wanted to post more, so I jumped on a Zoom with them,” Siddiqi tells Music Ally.
“It was really great to see that they were really curious and just wanted content ideas of things that they could do. And since they’ve gone on tour, they’ve been posting really frequently, and really interesting stuff. Tour vlogs, doing acoustic performances backstage, and just showing what life is like on tour.”
Siddiqi’s background is in management, having worked for seven years at Modest Management running digital strategy for artists including One Direction, Little Mix and 5 Seconds of Summer.
“My role was to get them to try new platforms, to create communities with their fans on these platforms, and to help them with their content strategies. And that’s essentially what I do at TikTok. My role is to work with labels, distributors, managers and artists and essentially help them with anything that they need on platform,” she says.
“That could be getting locked out of their account! It could be they’re stuck for ideas. It could be they just need some advice and want to run things by me. The great thing is I get to work across all genres: I could be working in pop, then I could be speaking to an indie band,, and then I could be dealing with a classical artist.”
The thread running through all of these is authenticity. Whatever artists are doing on TikTok, it needs to suit them as people, and their fans. Siddiqi warns that it’s really easy to see when an artist is doing something that isn’t authentic to them. “The fans can tell, and it doesn’t perform as well as it should.”
It’s not so long since the ‘artists are being forced to use TikTok and are burning out’ discourse was running wild within the music industry: a problem that was more labels’ making than TikTok’s.
However, the company has clearly been honing its message to artists about making best use of its platform without risking their wellbeing or authenticity
“If their fans are already on platform and there’s a community there, it makes sense to join that conversation and get involved. But I can understand that if you’ve never used the platform before, it can be like ‘Oh my god, what do I do?!’ But it’s really just about keeping it simple and trying different things,” says Siddiqi.
“Not everything’s going to be perfect, and not everything is going to work. But then you’ll figure it out: ‘Okay, the fans like it when I do performance content’ or ‘they like it when I just talk to camera… they like this, they’re not responding to that’ and then you start to get it. It can take a minute, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. You have to learn what’s authentic to you, and what your fans respond to.”
TikTok has its own culture, language and memes, which can be daunting for artists who haven’t used it regularly before. That’s one piece of advice that Siddiqi offers the musicians she talks to: sign up, follow your favourite artists, but also follow creators in other areas that you’re interested in, be it football, cookery or whatever else.
Something TikTok has been focusing on a lot recently are hashtags, particularly those that it uses to gather different categories of posts around music. #OnTour is a good example, launched alongside TikTok’s deals with Ticketmaster and AXS to add easy ticket-buying links to its app.
OnTour is pitched as a way for artists to share those videos of life on the road, as well as impromptu performances and even on-stage bloopers. Olly Murs (another of the artists Siddiqi worked with at Modest) recently shared a TikTok of his microphone falling over mid-set.
“Sometimes things go wrong, and it makes you a bit more relatable,” she says. Another artist she knows of old is Niall Horan, formerly of One Direction, who is taking another approach to his #OnTour posts.
“Someone from his team will go into the audience beforehand and get questions, which he’ll then stitch – which is when you intercut a TikTok and answer the questions. He’s also using it as a way to promote exclusive merch for each city,” says Siddiqi. “He has even shown his skincare routine before he goes on stage…”
It’s increasingly common for artists to have someone – be it a paid member of their team or just a friend who’s along for the tour – to be filming footage with short-video and socials in mind during tours.
Siddiqi points out that this takes the pressure off the artist: there’s someone else capturing the interesting moments, including when the musician is on-stage doing their actual main job: performing.
Others are bringing their performance skills into their TikToks, however. “Mike Skinner has been doing these scripted skits with his touring crew. They all get into it: they’ve memorised their lines… That’s been really cool to see, because I wouldn’t have suggested that! That definitely came from him.”
Siddiqi cites another British band, Blossoms, as having nailed the on-tour videos thing.
“They created this amazing piece of content where they made up a game backstage – I think it was just throwing a ball into a trash-can – and showed the rules. It was fun, they made it really dramatic, and it did well. And that’s when it clicked for them: they realised they could be silly and show their personalities, as well as showing off the music. They’ve continued to create really amazing content.”
Horan posted his skincare routine after a fan asked him to do it, and that’s another key piece of advice Siddiqi has for artists: read the comments. Which may sound counterintuitive in an age where on many social-media platforms, the comments are frequently toxic.
On TikTok, she suggests that they’re a deep pool of ideas. “We recommend that artists have their Q&A open on the app, so fans can leave questions whenever,” she says.
“If you are stuck for content ideas, look at the questions and look at comments, because that will help inspire you. And it’s also really exciting for a fan to see that you’ve responded to their comment, either in text or with a TikTok. It’s almost like a personalised piece of content for that fan.”
She also suggests that the more an artist puts out, the more they’ll get back: “If I know that my favourite artist does read and respond to comments, I’m more likely to comment.”
This extends to TikTok’s official artist profiles, and the recent ‘Fan Spotlight’ feature that enables artists to choose five fan-made videos that use their music and promote them on their profile.
“If you’ve taken the time to create a TikTok with your favourite artist’s music, and they acknowledge it by showcasing it on their profile – for which you get a notification – you would just be really excited. And then other people would be like: ‘Wait! I want that too!’ so hopefully that helps to drive more creations,” says Siddiqi.
It can also create unexpected opportunities for artists who are also fans of other musicians. Jordan Adetunji is another musician who she has been working with. The Belfast-based artist has been growing his TikTok audience over the last four years, and earlier this year he released a track called ‘Kehlani’ – inspired by the American singer/songwriter.
“Kehlani saw it and then created content with it [Adetunji’s track] and it took off. It’s now got more than 300,000 creations and is doing really well off-platform: on Spotify and it even broke into the official charts. And now Kehlani has teased that she’s going to be on the remix, which is so cool. I feel that really came about on TikTok, and it feels really organic. A young artist from Belfast getting that kind of opportunity is exciting to watch.”
BehindTheSong is currently another priority hashtag for TikTok’s team. Launched in April 2023, it’s focused on songwriters and producers – of course, many artists fall into one or both of those categories too – sharing their creative process on the platform.
“It’s one of the content ideas we feel any musician can do, essentially. You can talk about the story, you can talk about the process, show yourself in the studio, and then the final product of the song,” says Siddiqi.
Another piece of advice for artists and their teams is to keep tabs on what’s trending in TikTok more widely. For example memes and specific AR filters that are taking off can be used for posts, as they can on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram.
“Green Day are really good on-platform. Sometimes it’s archival content, sometimes it’s live content, but sometimes they’re just goofing around and using a funny filter,” says Siddiqi.
“I work with a violinist named Esther Abrami, who’s in her early 20s, and she is really good at adapting memes, and always taking them back to being in classical music or being a classical violinist. So that’s a skill as well: to take a meme and bring it back to who you are. She’s so good at that.”
TikTok has been leaning in to classical music, at a time when a number of young classical musicians have grown up in its app. Organist and conductor Anna Lapwood is one of the leading lights, and Siddiqi also praises Karim Kumar, a pianist and composer who’ll sit down at pianos in public spaces, take requests from passers-by, and post the videos to his TikTok.
A growing number of artists from all genres on TikTok are using the app’s live feature too, according to Siddiqi, who says that the company encourages this – both on their own accounts and with its weekly ‘Take The Mic’ show, which gets three artists to play live for 30 minutes.
“We work with the Live team and see who’s doing well on the platform, who’s really engaging. Often it’s artists who are already going live, so then we get in touch and are able to give them the [Take The Mic] platform.”
Siddiqi comes back to the idea of the fan communities that are growing on TikTok, and how artists can work with them, rather than simply post content at them. She cites Bring Me The Horizon as an example, when they were playing a festival in Malta.
A couple of fans who had no one to go with connected via the TikTok comments section and became friends; the band noticed; and created a space at their shows to encourage that.
“That’s part of being a superfan: if you’re the only one in your friendship group that likes a band, you can always find someone else [who is] and create that. I think TikTok is really good for that,” says Siddiqi. “It’s a space for fans to connect with each other.”
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