How Musicians Fix TikToks With 200-300 Views

We got Colton Beasley music here vocalizing and socializing. Now I think most of you know, I usually say that you want to have something that gets people curious about you, so they’ll actually listen here. But I will say if you’re not going that road, I think that’s a pretty strong one right there. No, I think that makes sense. I like the profile picture situation. Yeah, that’s also probably should be a link tree and not a YouTube link. So that’s what I was going to say. Yeah. Or just anything people can actually type in. Like if you don’t have a thousand followers and you don’t have a link, like literally I would just have dropout media.net, which is my company site. Right. Cause that’s like a lot easier to like read and then go and plug in that like youtube.com/yada yada. Yeah. Agreed. Okay. Let’s watch some TikToks.

[Music] The screen is way too busy. Really? I don’t agree. I guess my issue is that everything is compressed into that little band and the stuff above and below like all the text is just confusing. If it was moving, it would contribute, but otherwise it just feels like, Oh, I’m watching this compressed thing with a lot of blurriness on either side. I think this is a very smart way when you’ve shot in a landscape of doing this, but what I will say too, like this is a cool frame. I think that that part is well done, but I do think it’s a few, it’s actually a little too much of the frame and you could have pulled in a little bit on the shots. So we could have maybe gotten a little less cause this is a lot. What I’ll also say is like, I know we love a Rippin’ Guitar Solo, some people more than me, but it really is the thing is that everybody’s addicted to text these days. And so having lyrics go by and things like that really, really helps watch time. We see it over and over and over again. Aside from that, we’re working with what you got here. It is a decent, decent thing. I just think it’s a little too much. And like the fact is we’re on this, I’m blind as hell. And I will tell you this, I would never be able to read those credits there or anything like that. One thing I’ll do when I have a vertical video is I’ll do, um, let’s clarify this. When you have a portrait video or a, yes. Portrait and landscape, Matt, Jesus Christ. When I have, when I have a landscape video, This is what people came here for. I’ll triple stack it. You can see this on a few of the metal blade TikToks, where it’s just the same thing repeated three times. And that way it’s like a little more engaging and it’s all moving on the same thing. And it like, that just looks a little bit better. That’s my suggestion too. That’s all.

Okay. So here’s the next thing I want to discuss though. We have to discuss that these hashtags are, how do I say this nicely? Uh, probably some of the worst ones we could do. People I know don’t get trained in school how to do hashtags, but let’s just get this out of the way while we’re at the top. Hashtags teach TikTok the first people to show you two that would potentially like it. So you want it to be as niche as possible. So hashtag time, the idea that somebody who likes, uh, time is going to think this TikTok is good, is very low. Same thing with hashtag love the ride. And then singers of TikTok is one of the broad, most broad TikToks there is. So that is not going to be likely to do it. Now. I am not very good at this genre of music, but what I’d say is like, if you did more of like a hashtag Stevie Rayvon or hashtag John Mayer, whatever those genres are not necessarily saying hashtag those artists, but like whatever their genres, you would be good at it. I think I’ve been showing a lot of people lately is if you don’t know good places to start a good place to get clues is my favorite site music stacks. In fact, I think I have a TikTok about this coming out in the next few days. What’s that? Most of it. Cause I was looking for your content to steal. Oh, nice. Yeah. So I show this that, um, so if you click on an artist here, it actually says what type of music they are. Now singer songwriter, another one too broad, but you see out Neo mellow. You might go, what the fuck is that? You might look at that hashtag and you’ll see that that actually has a lot of hits doing that with like 12 artists is a really good clue on some hashtags you can use. If you don’t know what to use and you can find it. I mean, that takes like five, 10 minutes of work. Ooh, I like that. But bubble grunge is one of my old favorite genres back in the day. Uh, Shayla, I like that. That is like one of the first things is this is not going to get you to your first people on a lot of the reason I normally see people who are really, really stalled on their. TikTok growth is that they’re doing these hashtags wrong and they’re going to the wrong people. So as you can see on the screen here, I have this thing called vid IQ, and that actually tells you your engagement percentage. And that’s not a terrible engagement percentage, but it’s definitely not good. And if you get better hashtags, you’re probably going to do better. And then all of this in here, it’s much better to try to do a caption that like gets a little bit of engagement. So like even a thing of like, is this guitar so, so a rip in, should I do my hair the way it is in this video? Again, anything like that, that gets people engaged in the comments and so that their videos repeating more often is more likely to do you good than something is one year old. We have to get out of the old Instagram mindset and into an engagement mindset when it comes to these algorithms these days. Yeah, that’s a big one. Getting people to fucking talk about your stuff.

Ode pizza. Oh, my, my love, my darling, yeah, I’m hungered, hungered for your crust, alone, lonely time. So editing, let’s first talk about that having tights, ends and beginnings on your video is super, super, super, super important. All that time at the end there is going to kill your watches. This video would probably have triple the amount of watches if you just literally clipped off that end, which you can do in the TikTok app. But really, you should be editing everything in Capcutter, DaVinci Resolve, Boats of the Witch are free. I think this was a great idea. There’s an app called Captions that is absolutely fantastic and cheap each month that will really, really help you do good looking lyrics on the screen and that will get way more. The other thing that really gets more on these videos is like if you put up a title like this is how much I love pizza. Have you ever felt this way about pizza? Something like that. Instead of doing all this in the Captions, yet again, hashtags addicted and lactose free get you probably nowhere. Hashtag pizza on this one might actually get you somewhere.

I had a pretty similar take. Like I think it’s like you saw me laugh. Like it’s genuinely a funny video, right? It’s like that millennial pause versus Gen Z shake thing, right? Where it’s like, explain that. So Gen X people and millennials are used to devices that like take a second before they start going. So they pause and they wait for it to start recording. And then millennials will just start or sorry, Gen Z, like me, will just start talking because they just assume it’s recording. And I actually get really thrown when there is a pause because I’m like, oh, I didn’t realize that. But the other piece is that every generation gets smarter and better at understanding the context from content. And so when you’re trying to target people under 25 with your music, like it doesn’t matter if that first half second is cut off because people just put it together. Right. It’s like part of the Flynn effect thing where like people are getting smarter every 10 years. Every 10 years. Gen Z knows, you know, like, oh, I can just put together. It doesn’t matter that I missed the first three words. And that’s what TikTok is built on. It’s built around like if people are missing that context, they’re going to watch longer to try to get it if the video is interesting to them. So if you started even like like on the downbeat of your parody, right, people would immediately be like, oh, wait, what? You know, like, is he about to what is he why is he doing on chain melody? And then, oh, my God, it’s about pizza, you know? And I almost think it’s sometimes better to start on the downbeat because like, you know, an eighth note in because it’s like you’re immediately brought into it. You know, so I think there’s a lot of value there. People are expecting it to immediately start if they have to wait. Then they’re just already gone to watch. If you want to understand this, watch an eight year old use TikTok. No, but like I remember…

That called child protective services on the parent for wanting them to use it at that age. I like to remember watching my younger cousins use TikTok and I just remember watching them just like because I was talking to them, how do you know like what what’s good or not? They’re like, oh, well, you just see. And like they see like within like a tenth of a second. Like everyone’s like, oh, you have a second. That’s dramatically too long. Like it’s got to start going before it even gets going. A fun fact we perceive around four milliseconds is where most people start perceiving. And one of the things that they really train you in music and if anybody’s been through like intense music schools, they train you on micro timing and micro timing is getting down below the four millisecond thing that most humans can perceive of getting that accurate with your timing. And we really do perceive I go in and I really chop down to the millisecond on my videos. I wish DaVinci was actually a little bit better with letting me get a little bit more granular, easy, more easy without having to hit a bunch of keys to cut because it really matters. And to Matt’s point where he’s talking about starts, one of the big things is not giving a clue that it’s actually about to end. You all probably saw that cringe video last week. Is baby Gronk the new Riz King? I’m talking in the same thing. So you never get the fulfillment of a conversation ending because if I stay in this tone, you won’t know when the video is going to end and then it’ll keep going. That’s the lesson there is that like you almost want to end the video before people think you do. But what is interesting is, uh, as somebody who’s done a lot of AB testing of do you put the hook in once or twice in a video is sometimes the double hook is what gets it into people’s brains. With music, we’re dealing with another phenomenon of the earworm actually needs to seep into the brain to work. But, uh, so what could be really, really interesting is that like, while you want to try to get a lack of resolution there and you want to have it almost be a hair abrupt, what you also want is enough of the earworm that it actually concludes. So somebody feels something emotional from the melody so that they want to keep listening to it since our goal is not only for that TikTok to spread, but for them to like it enough that they jump over to Spotify or YouTube and stream it. Yeah.

Electronic chill wave musician from New York. I like that because chill wave is a thing that if you’re into it, you will probably be curious about it, but I still think we could generate more curiosity there so that somebody would want to click through. I just feel like that’s not quite there. And then, uh, you don’t need to tell people you’re on Spotify and YouTube. No, I think, I think that makes sense. I maybe, uh, save some characters say from NYC. Yeah. Yes, I agree. Agreed. You know, it’s also helpful to be like new song out now or something. Or like, I disagree. The new song out now is very ineffective. Okay. I don’t think that does anything. You want to create curiosity. That’s where you see the most click-throughs. So I guess what’s better is like, listen to song now. Right. So that don’t agree. Okay. No, I think that that’s, that’s some Instagram 2016. Okay. Here’s what I’m going to do. So I could see these engagement percentages, but I want to find one. So this one has an 11% engagement rate, but a very low amount of use. I think these are really teachable sometimes, uh, because what’s interesting about those is like, why did the algorithm not spread it? And we could probably figure that out a lot of the time. So let’s give it a whirl.

Sorry. The framing is pretty rough, especially because there aren’t like even waveforms to really look at, you know, it’s just hard to compel someone with framing like that. And like, I don’t think that you shouldn’t film your screen ever. Cause I think that has that good look. There’s a lot of those videos that do really well. Yeah. But I think that the framing has to be a little bit more, you can’t split it between two things like that, especially if the angle is weird and the glares and there, et cetera, et cetera. The song is actually really good. I didn’t realize that’s what Chillwave was. I think I thought Chillwave was lo-fi maybe. I mean, like the most perfect example of Chillwave, if you want it just the most song that plays at the beginning of Portland. Yeah. Oh yeah. But what I’m trying to say is the framing is what immediately struck me. You know, I also think when you have sort of a multicolored background that you’re on, the text on screen that you use should have the, it should be like in my videos, like I have the black text on a white background, like the bars are behind it, the white bar behind it, because that way it’s at there’s the contrast is immediately there rather than here where I’m trying to pick out the words behind the tag. It just isn’t very aesthetic. That’s also working against you. I think this would have worked a lot better if you had just cut that video, which looks cool vertically and just posted that. Yeah, I’m with you. I actually think like one of the weird genres I’ve been seeing more and more, and one of the things I’ve been talking to some of my consulting clients about is when you make really cinematic music, like rather than this, like kind of just stealing a scene and trying to get away with posting it by putting some filters on it or changing the speed a little. One of my other really good tricks that I’ve stolen from a lot of other YouTubers is I get those lens flares and I blend those into copyrighted material. And if you do that, you change the speed. Most detection circuits can’t figure out that you stole the video. That’s how I do a lot of stealing on my channel that I put a little bit of waviness in and with DaVinci Resolve. But so anyway, what I’m saying here is a lot of the time what a lot of people do is they like were like, wouldn’t the scene have been better if it had this in it? And especially a movie like Blade Runner 2049, which I think literally was one of the most botched soundtracks, especially since Johan Johansson started it and he was the goat until he died. I think doing something like that can get you more plays. Virality is always something familiar plus something new. So if you’re giving people something familiar, like a clip from a movie that feels appropriate, that’s immediately go like if you did the Blade Runner 2049 bit, for example, that’s immediately going to get people who like that movie engaged and go and like, Oh yes, I know that, you know, and especially move with a very clear aesthetic. You know what I mean? And I think that’s kind of a key piece to remember is like, you can tap into existing aesthetics and things people are already into. Yeah, I like that. Okay, so here would be my thing yet again. We’re in some niche stuff like cyberpunk music and retro wave could be cool. Chill wave could be cool, but like Blade Runner 2024 edit, you’re probably not going to get as much right yet again. I recently had a TikTok that fully bombed to the point that I, it was like just over the threshold where normally I would delete it and redo it differently. But I talked to a lot about that in your descriptions and in like what you put on the screen. You don’t always need to say what, but you should be saying why is sometimes a better question to do. And this is a yet again, a little too much what, so yeah, I would be less Blade Runner 2049. Like literally when you do your hashtags, say who are the most niche nerds that would like us, like even sometimes for synth music, let’s say you’re using a synth that’s a little more obscure or something like that or a technique that’s a little bit more dorky. That’s a good hashtag sometimes. I just want to point out on that using a dorky hashtag like that, realize that all of your early adopters in music are going to be musicians. And so if you’re using whatever technique you, if you’re, if you have, you know, I don’t know how many followers does this guy have? 237. Yeah. So if you have 237 followers,