Posting a song on TikTok doesn’t mean anyone hears it there. The artist’s account reaches people who already follow the artist. Everyone else tends to find songs under an anime edit, a football highlight or a late night drive clip that someone else posted.
A music clipping campaign puts a song under hundreds of those clips on purpose. Independent clippers make the edits, post them on their own pages across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, and get paid for the verified views they bring in. New to clipping? Start with What Is a Clipping Agency?
Here’s how we run music campaigns, and what to measure once one is live.
Why songs work so well for clipping
A song is easy to reuse. The same chorus can sit behind an anime edit, a goal, a breakup story or a gym clip, and each one plays it to a different crowd.
That flips the order of discovery. People come for the content and find the song second. They might never follow the artist, but they follow an anime page or a football account, and the song reaches them there. An artist account can test a few ideas a week. A campaign tests hundreds at once.
Two ways to run a music campaign
Sound led. The song is the audio behind clips about something else. Clippers source footage from a niche that fits the song, like anime, football, film scenes or travel, and post it with the official sound. The label only sends the official sound links, so these campaigns launch fast and are built for reach.
Footage led. Clippers cut the artist’s own material: music videos, live sets, interviews or behind the scenes footage. On our latest Rare Americans campaign, every clip had to come from the band’s official music videos. This builds awareness of the artist as well as the song, but it needs a content bank and usually takes longer to pick up.
Most of our music campaigns have been sound led, and that’s where we’d usually start. Some run both.
What goes into the brief
The brief tells clippers which song to use, what kinds of edits count and what gets a clip rejected.
A good one picks a lane where the song already fits. For AURORA’s “Runaway,” we asked for emotional, cinematic anime and animation edits. For our World Cup campaign, it was football edits during the tournament, which gave clippers hundreds of matches to work from. The lane also needs room to move, so hundreds of clippers can each find their own angle.
The rules stay short, because clippers skim. One is on every music brief we write: use the official sound.
Why every clip uses the official sound
When a clipper adds the song from the platform’s own sound library, the video is linked to the song’s sound page. It counts toward the song’s creates, the number of videos made with that sound, and viewers can tap through to the track.
A video uploaded with the song already in it usually loses that link. It can still get views, but it tends to show up as a separate original sound and adds nothing to the song’s page. That’s why our music briefs ban it.
How a campaign runs
Once the brief is set, most campaigns go live within about three days. Clippers submit each clip as soon as they post it, and every clip is checked against the brief. A clip only starts earning after 2,000 views, and views are checked for botting before any payout is final.
Pay is per 1,000 verified views, and every campaign caps what one clip can earn. When a clip takes off, most of its views cost nothing extra, and the rest of the budget keeps paying for hundreds of other clips. A budget can be paid out in three days or last a month, and the clips keep picking up views after it’s gone.
What one looked like: AURORA’s “Runaway”
In June we ran a sound led campaign for “Runaway” with a $2,000 budget. By September 23, the 161 clips we approved had 7.4 million views: $0.27 of budget per 1,000 views, about a third of our $0.79 average across 20 campaigns.
Use of the sound rose too. In the week before launch, about 12,400 new TikTok videos a day used it. During the campaign that averaged about 16,500 a day, up 33%.
What labels should measure
Start with what the campaign produces directly: verified views, approved clips and engagement. They come straight from the clips, so they’re the cleanest read on whether the campaign did its job.
Creates sit in between. Campaign clips count toward them, and so does anyone who hears the song in a clip and makes a video of their own. When creates rise faster than clippers could post, the song is spreading past the campaign.
Shazams, streams and searches come last. They matter, but they move for many reasons at once. A playlist add or a tour announcement can land the same week, so a jump in streams is a signal, not proof. On a song as big as “Runaway,” with more than a billion Spotify streams, creates show a campaign far more clearly than daily streams can.
How you measure matters too. We compare the average day during the campaign with the average day in the five to seven days before launch, and we report the best day on its own, labeled as the peak.
Here’s why. Before our campaign for Stick Figure’s “Edge of the Ocean,” the song averaged 88,007 Spotify streams a day. During the campaign it averaged 100,228, up 14%. Its best day hit 125,962, up 43%. Both numbers are real, but only one is the average, so when someone quotes you a stream lift, ask which one it is.
New releases and catalog songs
Clipping isn’t only for release week. Catalog songs come with recognizable moments, nostalgia and fan communities that already exist. “Runaway” is a catalog song, and it ran at about a third of our average cost per 1,000 views. So the question isn’t only how to launch the next single. It’s also which song in the catalog deserves another moment.
Where clipping fits
Clipping doesn’t replace playlists, PR, paid ads, touring or the artist’s own posts. It adds a layer on top. The artist’s account talks to fans; a campaign puts the song in front of people who have never heard of the artist, inside content they already watch.
We’ve run music campaigns for AURORA, Stick Figure, Rare Americans and Twin Fin, among others, and across all our campaigns, approved clips have passed 65 million verified views.
Got a release coming up, or a catalog song that deserves another run? Tell us about it and we’ll tell you whether clipping fits.