Spotify and Apple Music Roll Out ‘Share to TikTok’ Feature, Enabling Users to Link Directly to Songs, Audiobooks, and More

A new ‘Share to TikTok’ feature is enabling users to post and message to the short-form app about tracks from Spotify as well as Apple Music. Photo Credit: Spotify

It just got even easier for fans to share music on TikTok – according to the ByteDance-owned app itself, which has unveiled fresh integrations with Spotify as well as Apple Music.A Spotify rep reached out today with word of the appropriate tie-up, and TikTok disclosed both integrations via a formal release. Said integrations have arrived about one year after TikTok debuted an “Add to Music App” feature.

As its name suggests, that feature, expanded late last month, enables TikTokers to save music from the app directly to playlists on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

To put it mildly, quite a lot has changed during the past year. A now-resolved TikTok-Universal Music licensing dispute has made way for an ugly battle between TikTok and indies, for instance, and major-label artists’ TikTok initiatives are still in full swing.

Furthermore, the video-sharing app has abandoned its music-streaming ambitions by shutting down the standalone TikTok Music service. Needless to say, the move certainly didn’t hurt TikTok’s relationship with Apple Music and Spotify, which have one less competitor in emerging markets.

Building on those pertinent background details, Spotify users on iOS and Android can plug tracks, playlists, whole albums, podcasts, and audiobooks to TikTok via the music service’s “share” option. That includes sending tracks via TikTok DMs or posting them to the main feed; different TikTokers are then able to access the works (the media at hand will open in Spotify, of course) with a tap of their own, and the same is true when it comes to Apple Music.

In a statement, TikTok and ByteDance global head of music business development Ole Obermann pointed to “hundreds of millions of track saves and billions of streams” for Add to Music App on third-party platforms.

“Today’s launch of ‘Share to TikTok’ is the latest example of our ongoing commitment to support music discovery and artist promotion in partnership with music streaming services,” the former Warner Music exec Obermann communicated.

“Since its launch, ‘Add To Music App’ has already been responsible for hundreds of millions of track saves and billions of streams on our partner music streaming services. ‘Share to TikTok’ takes the user experience full circle, and will be an amazing way of promoting artists and tracks to the TikTok community,” he finished.

Notwithstanding its growing list of operational hurdles, TikTok remains popular – so it’ll be interesting to monitor Share to TikTok’s effectiveness in driving streams and especially new listeners moving forward.Bigger picture, TikTok’s expanded Apple Music and Spotify partnerships represent two of many ongoing integrations at the intersection of the social media and music worlds; Instagram in October rolled out an “Add Song to Spotify” feature through which users can save on-platform tracks to the streaming service.

(Spotify head Daniel Ek and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August penned a joint letter to EU regulators and lawmakers decrying the perceived “fragmented regulatory structure” surrounding AI in Europe.)

To be sure, the past year has seen TikTok quietly score deals with Ticketmaster (specifically an expansion of a prior agreement), AXS, CTS Eventim, and Eventbrite alike.