From Lyrics to Likes: Crafting Content with Strategic Music Licensing

What’s the best way to strike a chord with your audience? It might just be, well, striking a chord.

Music and sound are essential components of short-form video content. Almost 90% of TikTok users state that sound is key to the app’s experience and over 70% watch ads on TikTok with audio.

Popular songs and sounds are a great gateway into a cultural moment that you can tap into. Sharing music and singing together are two activities rooted in early human bonding behaviour, they strengthen community building and help people feel a sense of harmony. Bringing these elements together with striking visuals can be a winning strategy for branded content.

But before you start mentally arranging the perfect playlist for your campaign, take note that using music in creator marketing can occasionally be as complicated as free jazz polyrhythms. That is if you don’t know how to approach it properly.

Amanda Levine, Senior Director, Music & Licensing at Platinum Rye Entertainment, sat down with three experts in the field of music licensing for content creation to demystify this thorny zone and help marketers become virtuosos at picking their tunes.