In our round up of the best campaigns of 2019, TikTok was a recurring feature, with its use being a truly integral part of a wide variety of campaigns rather than a gimmicky add-on.
Even so, TikTok still faces challenges in terms of licensing music and ensuring it not only pays for music on the platform but also has the rights to use it in the first place. Indeed, in its first transparency report (published at the end of 2019, but covering the first six months of the year), it revealed it had received 3,345 takedown notices for copyrighted content in the first half of 2019 and that content was removed in response to 85% of those requests. This is small beer compared to the takedowns something like YouTube has to process, but the company is very much on a charm offensive to get artists, labels and publishers on side.
Notable among this push for positivity was a major collaboration with UK rapper Giggs. The month-long partnership saw Giggs’s official TikTok channel offering daily behind-the-scenes clips ahead of his biggest show in London to date at Wembley Arena on 6th December.
Clips posted included him on his tour bus, his track ‘Whippin Excursion’ playing as he passes the Eiffel Tower at night, him playing Mario Kart on his bus and fellow grime star JME coming on stage for a guest performance.
Toyin Mustapha, head of music content partnerships at TikTok UK, said, “We are excited to have Giggs on board, allowing our community to follow his day-to-day life in the lead up to the final show of his tour at Wembley. TikTok is home to a truly diverse community of artists with a wide range of people using it as a stage for all types of creative expression through short-form video.”
What is intriguing about this is that it’s exactly the kind of short-form and fanfriendly video content that would normally have gone on an act’s Twitter or Facebook. TikTok is obviously going to heavily promote it to its users to draw in new fans for Giggs, but it is also a public test to see just how much of a land grab it could make on other social platforms.
