State Champ Radio SoundOn
The catalog of Death Row Records, which includes canonical rap albums like 2Pac‘s All Eyez On Me and Snoop Dogg‘s Doggystyle, is now available on TikTok.
Snoop Dogg acquired the Death Row catalog last year and pulled it from streaming services, though Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic returned to platforms earlier this month, licensed to Interscope Records, in honor of the album’s 30th anniversary. The SoundOn deal marks the remainder of the Death Row catalog’s first official online release since it was pulled from streamers in February 2022.
“Since I took Death Row off streaming almost a year ago, not a day goes by without people asking me to put it back up,” Snoop Dogg said in a statement. “As the Super Bowl rolled around, I knew fans would be looking for the music from our iconic performance in 2022, so I wanted to reintroduce the most historic catalog to the people.” He added that Death Row releases “will be back on streaming services real soon.”
TikTok is touting the exclusive partnership, which launched on Sunday (Feb. 12) and continues for the rest of the week, as the “first-ever catalog reissue to release exclusively through SoundOn,” the distribution and marketing service the company launched in 2022. (SoundOn will distribute Death Row music to ByteDance platforms only, not to streaming services, once the exclusivity window ends next week.)
SoundOn was initially conceived to help “new and undiscovered artists,” according to TikTok global head of music Ole Obermann.
“We were hearing from a lot of artists that they loved being on TikTok and trying to build their community and hopefully reach really big audiences, but they were pretty overwhelmed, they didn’t really understand how to get onto TikTok, get music onto TikTok, get an account set up on TikTok, figure out how to position themselves in the right way,” Obermann told Billboard last year. “So what we came up with was, let’s have a special entrance into the platform that’s only available to these new and undiscovered artists, and then we’re gonna have a chance to work much more closely with them if this is the route they choose to come in. The goal is, really, that we find the promising artist and we walk them from the backstage door right onto the main stage and they’re there, they’re performing, it’s an incredible show and they’ve found their audience.”
Artists who have worked with SoundOn include Muni Long and Nicky Youre. It was initially only available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Indonesia but launched in Australia earlier this month.
BRISBANE, Australia — TikTok launches SoundOn in Australia, a tool that allows creators to upload their music directly, and get paid.
The new platform helps independent emerging artists navigate its service, upload music and get paid for its use, market and promote themselves on TikTok and distribute their music to outside DSPs.
SoundOn initially went live in Brazil and Indonesia in early 2022, then went out in the U.S. and U.K., also last year, before arriving this week for Australian users.
With SoundOn, TikTok becomes a music distributor, with a service that allows its users to upload their music to the likes of Spotify or Apple Music, in partnership with a third-party distributor.
Free to join in Australia, SoundOn promises to pay 100% of royalties to music creators in the first year, and offers help and advice from a dedicated, locally-based made up of a roster of homegrown music industry veterans, in addition to “TikTok music experts.”
SoundOn “can also distribute to other music platforms,” reads a statement, without identifying which streaming services or DSPs are currently on board.
The new offering at us.soundon.global or soundon.global opens for business in Australia with signings including Ashwarya, Aleksiah, The Drax Project, Roy Bing, Suzi Sings, Xanu, Kate Gill, Mikalya Pasterfield and CXLOE.
TikTok is a real hit with Gen Z in Australia, and is already a more popular social platform than Twitter among all internet users in these parts, according to data published in the Digital 2022 Australia report.
In separate news, TikTok confirms it is “running a test” in Australia over the coming weeks to analyze “how music is accessed and used on the platform.”
The results of those tests, observers say, could empower TikTok when the time comes to negotiate with its major label content partners on new terms.
“Not all music is included in this test and we do not expect it to impact everyone on TikTok,” reads a statement from the ByteDance-owned business. “While the test is underway, we expect that some of our users will not be able to access our full music and sounds library. For more than half of our community there will be no change to their experience and the test will not impact them.”
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