How To Make A Music Video For TikTok’s Algorithm

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How Music Videos Are Evolving With TikTok

TikTok is always changing, and one of the biggest complaints about the platform is that self-promotion falls really flat. When you make self-promotional posts on TikTok, they flop more often than when television networks air another terrible show where adults talk about how they don't get pronouns. These damn kids with their TikToks.

For the last half year, I've really seen that change as users have learned to make self-promotional TikToks more intriguing. You see these videos of people lip-syncing into the camera? Those are working well. And yes, many of the unknown DIY artists this works for are sometimes posting videos of them doing this in various ways, 30 to 60 times, before the earworm of the song hits the people who regularly get served their videos, and they watch them through. And after the earworm is in their head, they watch it repeatedly and drive up the video till it starts to go viral.

Since self-promotional TikToks seemed not do much, the next deduction was, what's the purpose of all that time and money you spent on a music video if it's useless on TikTok? Since TikTok breaks so many artists, why bother with your limited budget on a music video, right?

But I've seen how you can make music videos that build relationships with fans, get them to listen to your full song, and deepen your fan relationships, while also making them work on TikTok to create great content for your music that really does numbers.

How Music Videos And TikTok Compliment Each Other

One of the weirder things I've experienced when I'm consulting with musicians is that lately, they really are skeptical that spending money on music videos is worthy of their budget. Since when do you see the potential spread of TikToks, Reels, and YouTube shorts, by the numbers? It seems weird to invest in the music video since you want to go mega viral.

Which I have to say is a little shortsighted, since what I hear every musician who has a viral TikTok, a Reel, or a Short complain about is that it doesn't then equal streams. And what they really want is streams. Yet a music video is actually streams of a song, and they're thinking about neglecting that.

I seem to recall all of you wetting your beds when all the major labels drop your favorite artists for not hitting numbers. But you say the artist is everything to you. But they're dropping them because they're not getting numbers, and you're concerned about those numbers. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Then the other thing musicians complain about is when they just get one song to blow up on a playlist or on TikTok, is that no one forms relationships with them. But the number one relationship builder with an artist is a music video, and yet they keep thinking about cutting that from their budget. But no one ever said musicians had logic unless it's installed on their Mac. Thanks, everyone. I'll be here all week.

But why not think of a strategy that tries both short-form views on TikTok and can build relationships? This looks at the problem as black and white or an either-or issue. Instead of asking the question, how do I film a music video that I can turn into numerous TikToks that will do well in the algorithm, while making a music video that fans will love and watch repeatedly to build a relationship with. Which then gets those fans to share it and send it to their friends in its long form, and your fan base to spread. You can do it all in one.

How Caroline Polachek Made A TikTok Music Video

I'm going to show you how Caroline Polachek did just that. If you're not familiar, Caroline is one of the most innovative artists of our time. Really ahead of the curve and frankly can sing better than 99.9% of the planet without being the least bit American Idol show-off cringe stuff. And while she's been on a major label in the past, she's technically a DIY artist who owns her own label right now. She's also familiar with TikToks going viral since her song and dance for So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings turned into a trend on TikTok and spread the song massively.

I've seen this technique done a little bit, but it really hit home when I saw her do it. And then I was listening to her appearance on my favorite podcast, How Long Gone, and she gave up the game a bit, and it all made sense. Here's what she said:

So what does she mean by this? If you watch the video for her banger and one of my favorite songs of 2023, Welcome to My Island, you can see it's exactly as she describes. 18 scenarios where it seems like she filmed them through the entirety of the song, and then shows which part of the video to use for each scenario. And then if you shoot over to her TikTok, well, you can see she did it exactly as she said and posted them there and has a bunch of them that did numbers and promoted the song. And all she needed to do was chop them down so they'd loop well for TikTok.

And this is important since I would argue the relationships a fan makes with a video and the repeated listens make it way more valuable to invest your money. But as I said, this isn't an either-or situation. Instead, if you think of the video properly, you can have no compromises in your video and if anything, make it more focused and make it so you can turn it into short form videos in minutes by really thinking about how you frame someone in it so it converts to 16 by nine and how you're going to make it so that these scenarios can be used in short form as well.

Since let's always remember no one who's smart's goal is to just keep users on TikTok. It's to get them to build relationships with you. And music videos are how you do that best. So if you show all these people who are bored enough to sit through hours of AI brainrot, well, surely seeing that a song they like has a music video is often a better alternative because these are getting old fast.

How To Turn Your Music Video Into A Viral TikTok

Now, let's be honest here, some of you who actually have functioning brains are like Jesse, if videos where people just sing in their bedroom are working for getting viral TikToks, I'm just sticking to that. And that brings me to another lesson that we have seen time and time again.

If you're familiar with the concept of divergent streams, this is what a divergent stream looks like. Essentially, it's a theory I often talk about where each side is going further and further away from each other as time goes on, and the middle becomes increasingly irrelevant and something no one consumes or pays any attention to.

For example, throughout music, you have things like in the 2000s, you had N'Sync's song Pop, along with Shania Twain that are the most maximalist overproductions in music history. Seriously, these productions are way more overproduced than anything on the radio today. And then on the other side, you had the Strokes and The White Stripes, who were achieving massive success with records that were barely produced at all and as raw as could be.

Throughout time, this has existed even today. And it's exactly why you see the popularity of a bedroom pop song like Steve Lacy's “Bad Habit” exists at the same time as Bad Bunny's hit “Tití Me Preguntó”.

The way this relates to your videos and TikTok is you're able to do both with the music video, as you're able to take advantage of the high production music video scenes you shoot, and still do some lo-fi stuff you shoot yourself on your phone singing in your backyard, and take advantage of two things audiences love both the lo-fi and the high-fi. The raw, honest vibes of you and your camera in a relatable backyard scenario. And then the spectacle of a great shot in your music video that has one hell of a vibe helped to show your range to people and see that you're an artist worth paying attention to.

The fact is, what works on TikTok right now is a variety of promotions and not just throwing content at the wall, but instead making content that has a lot of movement and is intriguing. And both raw and polished can be intriguing. And like I was saying before, so many TikTokers are doing 30 to 60 TikToks of the same song before it blows up and just pushing it until it goes viral.

So if your next video, you take the simple philosophy that's been done for videos for the past 50 years, where you perform the song in various scenarios all the way through. You could then take from each scenario you filmed, the part of the song that has the hook that you shot, and simply crop it to work in a 16 by nine portrait frame. And well, you've got yourself short-form TikToks you could repurpose and help drive views to your songs and streams. And with that music video, you now have some of that higher-quality content that can build relationships. And if you pepper that with low-effort content like lip-syncs, well, you're on your way to having a ton of content to promote each song with.

Optimizing Your Music Video For TikTok

But some of you may have noticed that Caroline doesn't do exactly what I say, and she plays different parts of the song in her TikToks and not just the hook. Now, from what I've observed recently on TikTok, the real key, a lot of these unknown artists who go from let's say zero monthlies on Spotify to hundreds of thousands, what I see over and over again, is that the trick is repeating the hook.

We have to remember Caroline's pretty established. She's been around for a minute and has a preexisting fan base. She has to play by different rules than you. And while you can learn from her, I think what I've really learned from all the underground artists who are breaking with this technique is that they're repeating the same hook of their song over and over in the videos. They choose one part of it, and that's every video over and over and over again.

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So I would encourage you to get the color-corrected versions of each scene in your video where you sing the hook, and then make your shorts for TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram from those because that takes minutes. And if you have 18 scenarios in your video like Caroline, well, that's only 12 different times you need to lip-sync your song in the shower or twerking on top of your grandfather's head.

And if you want to take this even further, I've seen some artists sing their future singles in video scenarios for future content and then use that later, since, let's remember, our goals with TikToks are to just be in scenarios where people will watch to the end because they're intrigued by what they're watching. If you got a good scene, well, that doesn't go stale fast, and you can use it for a couple of songs.

Another great trick I talk about all the time is that whenever you're filming a video, half the battle is getting the lighting and setting the scene. So once that's done, film a few costume changes in that scene and get various songs in those different costumes if it works well. So you have tons more content to pick from.

Oh yeah, when I say costumes, don't get intimidated, you slobs. Sometimes I mean just changing your dirty jeans and maybe changing your shirt. I know that's a lot to ask from somebody.

And a lot of you may still feel like you don't have the budget to do any of this, but honestly, I see artists every day making amazing videos where they have one of the recent generations of phones, one 200-ish dollar light with some diffusion that can create a lot of light in a room. And then this $100 gem from Aputure, which is called an MC, that can do light in any color.

And honestly, that's all they need to make videos that get tons of views and look really good.

So don't count yourself out if your budget sucks. A little color correction tutorial after you've filmed some stuff and you're there.