TikTok Sounds: Adding Music To Your TikTok Videos

Music is one of the elements that makes TikTok special to most of its users, particularly younger ones.

TikTok users are more likely to find and share new music than those on any other social media platform, music “superfans” are almost twice as likely to use the app, and almost 84% of songs that hit Billboard’s Global 200 hit list started as viral sensations on TikTok.

Many artists release their new music on the app, music is (needless to say) an essential element of the trending dance and lip-synch TikTok videos that shot the platform to prominence, and it’s a powerfully engaging tool that most TikTok users include in their content production.

How do you add a popular song to your TikTok, and how do you upload your own music to the app? Let’s find out.

All About TikTok Sounds

“Sound” is the app’s word for any audio — original dialogue or narration, sound effects, or music — appearing in a vid. Users commonly speak to the camera, but even more often, they add one or more music clips to their videos. One study found that 85% of all TikTok videos contain music.

The platform has an enormous library containing more than one million songs from the catalogs of established and independent artists. Trending music leads the way, though, with 450 songs on TikTok that have received more than a billion views apiece.

How to Add a TikTok Song to a Video

The easiest way to use a song in your video is to choose one from the app’s library. There are several ways to do it.

Use TikTok Search

Tap on the magnifying glass at the top right of your home page, and you can enter a phrase like “trending music” in the search bar to see a list of the app’s most popular songs, along with the number of times people have used it in their videos. Using a trending song can help boost visibility for your video because lots of people are searching for it.

If you have a specific song in mind, search for it by title, artist, or lyric, and then tap the camera icon next to the version of the song you want to add. The “Create” screen will open with your sound already added. Just remember that the song you’re looking for might not be available in TikTok’s collection because of copyright issues.

Look in the Creative Center

There’s also a full, ranked list of trending songs in the TikTok Creative Center — but it can only be reached from a web browser by visiting tiktok.com/creator-center. You’ll then have to search for the song you choose in the app.

Browse the Sound Library

You can look through the app’s music library by tapping the Create icon (the “+” sign on the home page). A video creation screen opens, and you can click “Add sound” at the top to bring up a scrollable list of music. You can also select from your favorite sounds or recent ones you’ve come across.

Click the song to preview it, tap the scissors icon to edit it (if desired) and add it to your video. If you want to save it for later just hit the bookmark icon.

Upload Your Own Song

The best way to do this is in a third-party editor that lets you input audio from any source, export the finished video to your camera reel, and upload it to the TikTok video editor.

You can also upload a sound by recording it to your phone and then tapping the “Add sounds” section on the creation screen, opening the search window, and choosing “Discover more sounds.” Tap “Import local sound” and follow the instructions from there.

Beware; copyright issues could cause you big problems. All of the sounds in the app’s library can be used in videos because they’ve properly been licensed. If you upload an unlicensed song to TikTok and use it in a video, you’ll probably see the vid muted or deleted quickly, and you could wind up in legal trouble for using copyrighted music without permission.

Indy musicians who want to put their songs onto TikTok can deal with music distributors who work with the platform; many distributors will do that for free for legitimate artists. If you just want to use a song that you love in a video, though, tread carefully. Uploading music without covering your legal bases could end up in an expensive lawsuit.