What If I Told You That TikTok Is Losing Popularity With Music Users?
This has been an on again/off again year for TikTok, and for now, it’s back in the good graces of US regulators. You would think that would be wonderful news for artists and record labels alike, but there’s growing evidence that the popularity of music on the platform, especially with its youngest music users, is declining.
According to MusicWatch’s latest audiocensus study, completed in January, there are over 103 million music listeners on social video apps in the US, a rise of 80 percent since 2021. These listeners spend an average of 6.5 hours per week with music on social video apps. and that used to mean that TikTok received the greatest amount of that listenership.
Although that’s still true, it turns out that TikTok’s marketshare dropped a full 5 share points last year, from 34% to 29% of the market (see the chart above), which may not seem like a lot but it’s more meaningful than you think.
And what picked up the slack? YouTube Shorts and Facebook Reels.
But The Youngest?
That figure is shocking in itself, but even more so is the fact that there’s an even bigger decline in the youngest users on the platform, or those between ages 13 to 24. This was 9 share points, from 51% to 42%. The 13 to 24 age group was once thought to be the bedrock of not only TikTok, but exactly the demographic targeted by record labels.
The problem here is that no one has a concrete theory about why this is happening. It could be because the platform was taken offline for a brief period in January, scaring enough users into believing that this eventually might be permanent. It could be that TikTok is begin to suffer the inevitable decline that all social platforms go through once they’ve been around for a while. After all, just about everything online has a lifespan, but just like life itself, we don’t know how long that will be.
Either way, this could very well be a sign that TikTok’s dominance with music users is beginning that slow spiral down. It should be interesting to see how both artists and record labels respond.
