The Impact of Social Media on Music Demand: Evidence from Quasi-Natural Experiments

TL;DR

This study investigates how TikTok disruptions impact music streaming demand, revealing that viral songs are most affected and that TikTok acts as a key discovery platform influencing downstream streaming and chart success.

Contribution

It provides new evidence on TikTok's causal effect on music demand using quasi-natural experiments and clarifies the heterogeneous impact based on song virality and exposure concentration.

Findings

Reductions in TikTok access decrease off-platform streaming demand.

Highly viral songs experience significant declines in Spotify streams.

TikTok acts as a discovery platform, influencing downstream playlist success and chart rankings.

Abstract

We study how TikTok affects demand for music on paid streaming platforms. We use two quasi-exogenous disruptions to TikTok access that generate independent variation in exposure: Universal Music Group's (UMG) global withdrawal of its catalog from TikTok in February 2024, and the 2025 U.S. TikTok outage and subsequent install restriction. Across both settings, we reach the same bottom-line conclusion: reductions in TikTok access lower off-platform streaming demand. Recent work using the UMG setting reaches mixed conclusions about whether TikTok primarily promotes or cannibalizes streaming demand. We show that these findings can be reconciled once we account for power-law-like concentration in exposure (10% of songs account for 95% of TikTok creations) and that, in such environments, common DiD implementations (levels, log, and Poisson) target different estimands and impose different counterfactual trend restrictions. We document sharp heterogeneity: the typical long-tail song exhibits little change when TikTok access is removed, while highly viral titles experience meaningful declines in Spotify streams. Because the viral head accounts for a disproportionate share of total listening and revenue, these losses drive the market-level implications. The evidence is consistent with a mechanism in which TikTok operates as an upstream source of discovery and Spotify playlists act as a downstream amplification layer: declines increase with TikTok virality, UMG songs with no prior TikTok exposure show null effects, and UMG songs accumulate fewer followers on Spotify curated playlists. We also document downstream consequences for rights holders, with UMG songs becoming less likely to reach top charts.