Music promoters are paying to put songs in TikTok videos. The FTC says creators might not have to disclose those deals.

The Federal Trade Commission does not play around when it comes to creators disclosing paid promotion in their videos. As the creator industry has matured, with more and more brands paying creators to promote their products, the FTC has kept an ever-sharper eye out, and has clarified its guidelines multiple times to warn creators about proper disclosure. Those guidelines are stringent, and rule that creators have to disclose more than just getting cash payments in exchange for product promotion: they have to disclose any kind of financial relationship with brands that could influence them to post more positively.

But those guidelines apparently don’t apply to song promotion.

And over on TikTok, that could be a problem.

Billboard recently took a deep dive into the world of “sound campaigns,” where musicians, record labels, and/or promoters pay to have music tracks used in TikTok videos. It spoke to sources familiar with the matter, including one majormarketer who, based on their experience, believes that “75% of popular songs on TikTok started with a creator marketing campaign.”

That’s fine. If anything, it further highlights the power of creators.

What’s not fine is that a large portion of those videos may not be disclosed as ads, because (as another source told Billboard) musicians/labels/promoters often don’t ask the creators they’re paying to make any particular kind of content, so there’s no direct mention of the artist or their song; these videos are simply the creators posting the sort of content they would normally post, just with the song playing in the background.

Isn’t that against FTC rules?

Well, an FTC representative told Billboard, “When there are songs playing in the backgrounds of videos, there are no objective claims made about the songs. The video creator may be communicating implicitly that they like the song, but viewers can judge the song themselves when they listen to it playing in the video. For these reasons, it may not be necessary for a video to disclose that the content creator was compensated for using a particular song in the background in the video.”

So…the answer seems to be no. For now, at least, the FTC does not explicitly require creators to disclose when they’ve been paid to include a song in their videos. (The rep did add that the FTC would “evaluate each case individually however.”)

What does that mean for musicians—and creators? Billboard found that the scope of music promotion has changed on TikTok over the past few years. Back in 2020, labels were paying creators like Charlie D’Amelio tens of thousands of dollars to do choreographed dances to new songs from artists like Jennifer Lopez, hoping to spark the app’s next trend. One creator manager told Billboard they knew of a creator who’d been paid $50,000 to play a song in the background of their video.

Now, things are a little different. Top creators can still get around $10,000 per video, but most music promoters aren’t blowing their entire budgets securing one marquee creator; instead, they’re “spreading their budgets over many videos from smaller creators to make the illusion of a less-detectable groundswell of support,” Billboard reports. It says microinfluencers (<10,000 followers) get payments as low as $25 for using a song in the background.

That means indie musicians and labels who are hoping their songs will go viral organically are competing—perhaps without even being aware of the competition—against sound campaigns backed by hundreds or thousands of dollars of marketing. They’re at a disadvantage, and one that doesn’t appear easy to solve.

For creators, though, working with musicians could be another avenue for monetization. And while the FTC’s current position on labeling song promotions as ads is wishy-washy, prudent creators may want to stick a disclosure on there. It could come in handy later.