How TikTok's in-house data helped SiriusXM build a radio station tailored to young listeners
- TikTok has become an important starting point for trends in music.
- SiriusXM partnered with TikTok to launch a radio channel built around popular tracks on the app.
- The arrangement has helped both companies branch out into new formats and reach different audiences.
TikTok did not kill the radio star. But as with everywhere else in the music industry, it's exerting its influence over the format.
In August 2021, TikTok co-launched a radio channel with SiriusXM as part of a content partnership. It has quickly become a flagship station for SiriusXM, often touted by executives as an example of how the company is programming content for young people.
"We're really thrilled with the response the station has had," Steve Blatter, the senior vice president and general manager of music programming at SiriusXM, told Insider. "It is reaching an audience that I don't think has been catered to previously."
Like TikTok's "For You" page, which recommends videos featuring songs across a wide array of genres, what ends up playing on TikTok Radio feels a bit all over the place.
In one recent session, a sped-up version of Oliver Tree and Robin Schulz's new release "Miss You" transitioned into Kate Bush's 1985 track "Running Up That Hill." In another, Lil Wayne's 2008 hip-hop song "Lollipop" preceded the somber 2022 track "Until I Found You" from Stephen Sanchez and Em Beihold.
In between tracks, the channel's hosts, who are TikTok creators themselves, often explain how a song went viral on the app. During one segment, the host Cat Haley explained that "Rich Flex" by Drake and 21 Savage had taken off on TikTok after creators posted comedic videos using the track's lyrics, "21 can you do some' for me?"
"You are keeping this trend and this song extremely prominent, baby," said Haley, who, in addition to being a SiriusXM host, has about 750,000 TikTok followers.
How SiriusXM and TikTok work together
Like most businesses built around music, TikTok is regularly influencing what songs show up across many of SiriusXM's music channels, Blatter said.
"I've always taken a very agnostic view as to where a piece of music comes from," he said. "Through our relationship with TikTok, we are able to learn about new artists, new songs that are bubbling under."
The short-video app has become an increasingly important player in the music industry, serving as a hub for music discovery and regularly propelling songs into the mainstream and often to the top of the Billboard 100 or Spotify Viral 50. And while SiriusXM operates on a different business model from TikTok's, built on radio subscriptions and in-car streaming, industry experts say its move to partner with TikTok last year was savvy.
"It's smart because, if anything, it will introduce the Sirius brand to a younger audience," said Keith Jopling, a consulting director at the music-research firm MIDiA Research. "Realizing that, 'Hey, these guys over here are where the action is, but we can give them a platform.'"
TikTok shares trending song data with SiriusXM twice a week, using data points like video views, the speed at which songs are rising on the app, and its own editorial calendar for music (TikTok Radio recently ran an R&B-music episode tied to the TikTok hashtag #RnBVibes). The SiriusXM and TikTok programming teams converse daily, said Marie Steinbock, SiriusXM's music-programming director who oversees the channel's content.
TikTok also helped SiriusXM select which creators would serve as TikTok Radio hosts, a role that includes recording for the channel twice a week and occasionally taping longer interviews with artists like Meghan Trainor and Charlie Puth.
"We did go through a very hefty host-selection process," said William Gruger, who works on global music programming at TikTok. "What we tried to focus on in host selection is hosts that really have distinct lanes and sort of focus areas and areas of expertise," he said, pointing to creators like the music-culture critic Masani Musa and Davis Burleson of "What's Poppin?" as examples of creators with different content backgrounds.
Branching out to a younger audience
SiriusXM views TikTok Radio as a path to attracting the next generation of subscribers. The company's executives have previously said that its service tends to reach older consumers.
"I do think that we skew older," SiriusXM's executive vice president and CFO, Sean Sullivan, said at a Deutsche Bank conference in March. In September, Sullivan cited TikTok Radio as an example of the station's efforts to find content that "really resonates with younger consumers to address some of the generational shifts that you see in the business."
SiriusXM, which also owns Pandora and is an investor in SoundCloud, declined to share data on TikTok Radio's listenership, telling Insider that the channel's audience featured a wide mix of listeners including TikTok users, parents of children who use TikTok, and sometimes Uber drivers.
"Our first reaction to who might be listening to TikTok Radio is a younger audience, which I think it definitely is," Steinbock said. "A lot of families are listening to it and a lot of older people who aren't necessarily in on TikTok but want to be."
For Steinbock and her team, the task of programming music content based on TikTok trends, which can emerge and vanish in a matter of days or hours, is hard.
SiriusXM's team will often work with TikTok in real time to get rights to stream certain audio snippets while a clip is still popular on TikTok. The group recently coordinated with TikTok to get permission to play the Louis Theroux audio-sampled track "Jiggle Jiggle" by Duke & Jones before it was officially released, for instance.
For the TikTok Radio hosts themselves, preparing for a SiriusXM recording session often just means bingeing on TikTok like a typical user.
"I just navigate the app as I normally would and log stuff in as I'm scrolling and see if it would do well on TikTok Radio," said Musa, a creator who posts about music to about 360,000 TikTok followers under the username CultureUnfiltered. "It's not so much just going from my own personal taste, but going from how the content is reaching people and how people are reacting to it."
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufony1tcqtpqRlopaxqruMrKCroaWoxa55z5qpraaVp8Cptc9mmqudkam8s7%2BMoaasrF2rtrOty2aqqKaXYsGzsc2dqmadqKW5orXNnptmamBnf259kA%3D%3D