TikTok Picks Streaming Service Audius to Power New ‘Sounds’ Library

Audius, a music streaming platform based on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains, is partnering with TikTok on the video-sharing app’s new “TikTok Sounds” library.

The partnership is the first of its kind for TikTok, and aims to streamline TikTok’s current music upload and selection process. Audius users are now able to simply upload tracks and share them to TikTok, which Audius’s founders say takes less than a minute. 

Audius is the first streaming platform to allow direct sharing to TikTok, in a small coup for a music platform that only recently crossed the 5-million-user mark. 

An Audius spokesperson told CoinDesk that Roneil Rumburg and Forrest Browning, the platform’s founders, are “close with a few folks at TikTok and leaned on those prior friendships” as they went about partnering with the buzzy social platform.

“We’re proud to be one of the earliest launch partners for TikTok Sounds and to give the artists on Audius a chance to increase their exposure even more,” Browning said in a press statement.

Audius, which was founded in 2018, is now the largest decentralized consumer blockchain application, by some metrics. The platform boasts a roster of over 100,000 musicians including Skrillex and deadmau5.

In July, Audius announced a partnership with the Solana Creator Fund to attract new artists to its platform. 

“Alongside our efforts with Solana to support creators entering the space, the TikTok integration increases the funnel of potential creators who can discover [Web 3] and crypto more broadly,” Rumburg told CoinDesk via email. 

Like TikTok, Audius does not currently pay royalties to artists using the platform to stream music but offers a platform to engage with fans and find listeners. TikTok, which now has over 1 billion monthly users, reported that 75% of its U.S. users find new artists via TikTok videos. 

“A very big step forward with this new feature,” said Guy Lawrence of Disclosure, an EDM duo that uses Audius to stream music. “Having the ability to share my uploads straight from Audius to TikTok is a real time saver.”

The TikTok sharing feature went live on Monday for all Audius users.