Artists Often Don’t Achieve Long-Term Streaming Growth After Going Viral on TikTok, Recent Studies Reveal

A new study from Duetti's ‘Music Economics Report' indicates that TikTok’s influence on an artist’s streaming success after they go viral is often short-lived. While the study primarily focuses on streaming payout rates, it also examines TikTok's broader impact on the music industry.

Its findings reveal that even among the <1% of tracks that “go viral” on TikTok, only ~15% experience long-term streaming growth on other DSPs, like Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music, and others. For the study, virality was defined as doubling TikTok video creations (aka TikTok videos) using that track within one month, with a minimum of 250K TikTok video creations. Meanwhile, long-term streaming growth was measured by a sustained increase of more than 30% in average Spotify streams over the pre-viral baseline, recorded 4 months after the viral moment.

Notably, the report highlights that no specific genre has a greater tendency to go viral on TikTok—viral artists span diverse genres, including Latin, Hip-hop, and Gospel.

The research also sheds light on how much each streaming platform pays artists. While the report promotes TikTok’s role as a valuable promotional and discovery tool for independent artists to reach new audiences, it underscores that TikTok’s payout rates remain extremely low and behind other DSPs. The rate it pays for 1,000 streams (video creations for TikTok) is significantly lower than Spotify’s, which itself was the lowest-paying DSP in 2024. For comparison, Amazon Music, the highest-paying DSP that year, paid nearly three times more than Spotify: $8.8 compared to Spotify’s $3.0 for 1,000 streams.

Based on the findings, Duetti concludes that TikTok-driven exposure must translate into higher streams across major streaming platforms to foster meaningful, long-term revenue growth for artists.