If you’re a sports fan on TikTok, you’ve almost certainly heard the song “Orla” by the British DJ and producer Nimino. Since its release in early March, the song has soundtracked nearly 150,000 videos on the platform.
For Nimino, that doesn’t just mean more exposure for his music. It means money.
A lot of the sports-world accounts that have used his track are businesses—Atlético de Madrid, the “Men in Blazers” podcast, Major League Baseball, the LPGA, and the Philadelphia Eagles—that accessed the song via TikTok’s growing Commercial Music Library (CML), which ensures artists are paid when their music is used commercially.
The library offers the platform’s roughly 7 million business users access to 1.5 million tracks—not just generic royalty-free ones, but songs by label-signed artists, like Nimino. The kind of music, in other words, that allows business to capitalize on TikTok trends and even start one themselves.
Whether they’re making an organic post or creating an ad, business accounts have to play by a different set of rules on TikTok. Unlike regular users, they can’t use music from the platform’s general music library without securing commercial rights, a costly and time-consuming effort that requires sign-off from both the track’s label (for the recording) and publisher (for the songwriting).
“A lot of the brands on TikTok are actually small-to-medium businesses that don’t necessarily even know about music rights,” says Tracy Gardner, TikTok’s global head of music business development. “Even if they did and they went knocking on the door of the major rights-holders, they wouldn’t be given the time of day.”
TikTok’s commercial library, like those of other video sites, was initially created with a focus on production music, or songs produced by companies that own all the rights and can easily license them for commercial use.
Production music still accounts for roughly one-third of TikTok’s CML. But unlike the platform’s competitors in short-form video, TikTok’s commercial offerings also now include licensed pop, electronic, and wrap music from label-signed artists.
Since 2023, when it expanded its partnership with Warner Music Group and the conglomerate’s publishing arm Warner Chappell Music to include the commercial library, TikTok has been working closely with labels, distributors, and publishers to negotiate partnerships, clear music, and add rights holders to the CML, growing the library to include 125 million associated rights holders.
Those rights holders are finding that being part of the CML is creating an entirely new revenue stream—akin to sync, the use of a song in a TV show or movie, but at the scale of virality.
That virality is key. Though TikTok doesn’t disclose details of its payment structure, it does confirm that rather than receiving a flat rate for unlimited uses, rights holders in the CML get a revenue share from paid ad buys and money from organic content posted by business accounts, with earnings going up as more people use the song.
“We now have a new revenue stream that’s rivaling that of some of our established [streaming] income,” says Marie Clausen, North America managing director at the NinjaTune label, which has opted 2,500 songs from its 54,000-song catalog into the TikTok commercial library.
Micro-sync, big money
TikTok’s commercial library allows brands to get in on viral moments featuring rising hits. But it also puts newer and lesser-known songs in front of businesses, which can be valuable for labels and artists trying to increase their visibility.
“Someone in Brazil that has a corner store is starting to use Thundercat’s music,” says Clausen, referring to a NinjaTune artist. “Even if we were able to reach that person, we wouldn’t want to do millions of licensing agreements with little accounts. Having TikTok facilitating that is a fantastic solution.”
The TikTok Music team also helps surface songs and artists from its vast commercial catalog through curated playlists. The TikTok Creative Center, a resource for business accounts, showcases playlists based on genre, virality, or even events like Mother’s Day or Juneteenth.
“A lot of the brands that are using the CML, they don’t even know what they’re looking for; they want to quickly slide in a track and get that post live,” NinjaTune’s Clausen says. “The TikTok team who run the CML are music lovers by heart—they want to make sure it’s a bespoke, premium library.”
Clausen points to “Boy,” a 2017 song by NinjaTune artist Odezsa. Last year, it was featured on a CML playlist, which helped drive it up the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart and beyond. “We saw a ripple effect on other platforms—a Spotify uplift of 34% over the next 28 days,” Clausen says. “On Apple Music, we saw an increase in 123%. And we didn’t just see it in America, we saw it around the world.”
Eric Fritschi, who founded the independent label and marketing company Ansatz Music in 2021, initially uploaded instrumentals by German band Milky Chance to the CML. Later,he added the band’s song “Naked and Alive” (which he renamed “OK I Like It” to sound brand-friendly). It quickly went viral, and has been used in more than a million videos, garnering 10 billion views.
“In general, what CML has done for Milky Chance is take us from getting hundreds of millions of views on TikTok every year to billions of views,” he says. He also notes that as artists add new songs to TikTok’s commercial library, older songs will see renewed interest. In April, while Milky Chance was promoting a new single, an older electronic remix of its “Stolen Dance” was being used in tens of thousands of new videos daily.
“TikTok CML has become the number-one revenue driver for me,” Fritschi says. He says that while he initially thought the library would be helpful for driving impressions and listens across TikTok, “it’s actually turned into good money. And we’re taking that money and putting it into streaming marketing, more content, and being able to invest in the artist.”
Streamlining new additions
As TikTok grows the commercial library, it’s had to navigate cases where the rights to a song are divided in complex ways that can’t be handled via its existing agreements.
For those, TikTok is piloting a program with the startup Chordal, which has built a rights-clearance tool called InstantClear. The platform allows anyone with claim to part of a song to pre-clear their permissions and automate royalties payouts from the TikTok commercial library.
“Chordal helps us operationally streamline the process of unlocking more complicated split-rights tracks,” says Ben Houston, TikTok’s head of commercial licensing. “Let’s say we get a track from a label that has three different publishers with which we don’t have a blanket deal for commercial use. Chordal steps in.”
The partnership, which was announced last July, has so far seen 54,000 rights holders sign off on commercial use, adding 20,000 songs to the library. Chordal’s founder and CEO, Grayson Sanders, says that multiple rights holders have started pulling in six-figure incomes thanks to InstantClear, and 18% of music that’s been added to TikTok via Chordal is already seeing revenue.
Los Angeles-based music publisher Heavy Duty Music added songs by U.K. songwriter and producer Louis LaRoche to TikTok’s commercial library via Chordal last summer. Since then, LaRoche’s songs have been used in more than 10,000 videos, garnering 17 million views in his first four weeks in the CML. Chordal also gives rights holders transparency into how much they are earning via TikTok.
TikTok’s commercial music offering has been so strong for record labels that Clausen says when NinjaTune is thinking about signing an artist, “we are already identifying, is this a potential candidate that could go into the CML? And we are looking at what the clearance would take, because what we really want to do is not just have back catalog songs in the CML, we want [new music] in it, too. That is where you have the real flywheel effect.”
