This is less about an individual musician’s use of Snapchat and more about extending its licensing footprint while finding new ways to incentivise creators (many of whom will be using music in their clips).
Snapchat launched its Sounds feature in late 2020 (to allow users to add licensed music to their posts, just as they can on things like TikTok and Instagram Stories); but it took until the summer for the platform to sign a deal with Universal Music Group.
The UMG deal goes beyond the audio and will see the label’s acts create more AR lenses “with the opportunity to feature merchandise launches and e-commerce experiences”.
When it announced the UMG deal in June, Snapchat revealed that since the launch of Sounds some 521m videos had been made using licensed music and they collectively resulted in 31bn views.
The fact the platform has a music deal in place with the biggest music company in the world is a sign of where its ambitions for Sounds lie, seeing music as absolutely key to powering both content and user growth on the app while selling it through to musicians as a powerful marketing platform.
It is also using financial incentives to get creators more engaged on the app and producing more and more videos.
Around the same time as the UMG deal, Snapchat set up Spotlight Challenges, where prize pools of between $1,000 and $25,000 are being offered to creators over the age of 16. They will be split between the assorted winners of specific challenges (usually between three and five winners per challenge). These challenges include the use of a specific AR lens or audio clip (including music).
This incentive scheme coincided with the launch of a “creator hub” that offers guidance to users on the types of posts that work best on Snapchat.
Snapchat’s financial results revealed the company had 306 million daily active users in Q3 this year, up from 249m a year earlier. That is some distance behind the 1bn daily users TikTok claims to have, so it is clear that Snapchat wants to apply some TikTok tricks to its growth – and central to that is music.
But, as with the Megan Thee Stallion example above, it does not always follow that simply signing up music from A Pop Star Who Is Huge On Platform X will deliver equivalent numbers on Snapchat.
