TikTok Empowers Songwriters With New Profile Features: What This Means for the Startup Ecosystem

Image Credits: Artur Widak/NurPhoto / Getty Images

TikTok is stepping up its offerings for the music creator community by introducing special features tailored specifically for songwriters. With the launch of a new beta, select songwriters can now add a "Songwriter" label to their profiles and organize their creative output in a dedicated tab. These changes are designed to help music creators showcase their work more effectively, attract collaboration opportunities, and enhance visibility on one of the world’s most influential social platforms.

New Tools for Elevating Songwriters

The latest update enables a limited group of publishing partners and songwriters to participate in the beta. Those eager to join can sign up via a waitlist while TikTok tests out these features. By grouping all their songwriting credits and musical projects in a single profile location, songwriters can more easily present their portfolio to prospective clients or collaborators.

This initiative is grounded in a comprehensive effort by TikTok to understand creator needs. The company surveyed over 870 songwriters and conducted interviews to identify core requirements, focusing on solutions that address effective self-promotion and the creation of monetization pathways. External research cited by TikTok indicates that more than half of surveyed songwriters already use platforms like TikTok to boost their profiles, underscoring the platform’s growing influence in music discovery.

Industry Context and Competitive Moves

TikTok’s new songwriter features echo efforts by other streaming platforms. For example, Spotify has long provided songwriters with ways to highlight their work, and Tidal has introduced royalty tracking tools to help creators manage and monetize their credits. Even as TikTok closed its standalone music streaming app in 2024, the platform remains a vital channel for music discovery and artist engagement. This year, TikTok also introduced its "TikTok for Artists" platform, enabling artists to monitor the impact of their campaigns within the app’s unique ecosystem.

Deep Founder Analysis

Why it matters

TikTok’s expansion of creator tools is a sign of the growing importance of personal brand and portfolio management for modern creators. For startups in the music tech and creator economy sectors, this highlights the value of building features that help users not just reach audiences but actively organize and promote their output. In a world where content creators double as entrepreneurs, platforms offering more granular control and visibility over creative credits are filling an emerging gap.

Risks & opportunities

There’s an opportunity for startups to serve broader segments of the creator ecosystem. As TikTok and others offer enhanced portfolio and monetization tools, new entrants could target underserved niches: independent publishers, multilingual creators, or emerging genres. However, startups face the risk of platform dependency — when a dominant player like TikTok controls discoverability and monetization, smaller apps may struggle for relevance unless they offer unique value or integrations. Referencing historical parallels, this echoes how social platforms' pivot to video impacted third-party video startups, driving rapid shifts in opportunity and risk.

Startup idea or application

This development points toward a potential SaaS startup delivering "universal creator portfolio management." Imagine a platform that aggregates, syncs, and showcases a creator’s songwriting credits, royalties, and collaborations across TikTok, Spotify, Tidal, YouTube, and more. Such a tool could analyze engagement data, recommend monetization opportunities, and facilitate negotiations or licensing — building the infrastructure creators need as their business operations become increasingly complex.

TikTok songwriters music tech creator economy music discovery

For further reading on open creator ecosystems, see Jack Dorsey Invests $10M in Nonprofit to Advance Open-Source Social Media, or explore music technology trends in India's Quantum Leap: How QpiAI Is Powering a New Era in Computing.

Visit Deep Founder to learn how to start your own startup, validate your idea, and build it from scratch.

📚 Read more articles in our Deep Founder blog.