How do TikTok and Instagram pay me?
1.5 min read 
- How TikTok and Instagram exactly calculate the payout to the artists
- What amount you can expect approximately
- Whether you can expect high payouts
Some distributors, including iGroove, give you the option of sending your songs to TikTok and Instagram/Facebook. These are then stored in their Music Libraries and can be integrated in users’ videos, stories, etc. This is not only an opportunity to expand your reach; the platforms also pay the artists when their songs are being used. But the question is: How exactly?
TikTok
TikTok does not pay artists based on the number of views that the videos reached with your songs, but based solely on the number of videos that were made. So, if there are 10 videos that include your song and they amass 100,000 views, what counts is the 10 videos created, not the 100,000 views.
Since TikTok uses a pro-rata payment model, there is no fixed amount for each uploaded video that includes your song. The amount can thus vary from month to month, but it is well below one cent per created video. So, it takes tens of thousands or, better yet, hundreds of thousands of videos until a significant amount is accumulated. Whether the videos go viral or not has no impact on the payment.
Instagram / Facebook
On Instagram and Facebook, too, the deciding factor is not the number of views but instead the number of stories, reels, etc. that used the song. Additionally, the amount that is paid out for each created story is connected to the location of the creator. Depending on the country of origin, payments can vary between $0.000288 und $0.006812 per uploaded story.
Based on these numbers, the average payment would be $0.0023. So, if your track is used in 1,000 stories or reels, you would make $2.30 or, in an ideal situation, a little more than $6.
Another thing to mention with Facebook and Instagram is that they count your songs not only when videos include them via a music sticker, their content ID also recognises your songs when a user plays the track live in the background of their video.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the payments from these social media platforms are currently nothing more than a little pocket money for the band. For this reason, you should view these platforms primarily as a promotional tool and the payments simply as a welcome bonus, which in the best-case scenario can get you an additional few hundred or thousand dollars over the year.
