Can I Use TikTok Music on YouTube and Other Platforms? Why You Can't and What to Do About it

Making video content is easier than ever these days. Smartphones have amazing cameras, digital cameras are affordable and easy to use, and there are an endless number of video editing apps, AI-powered features, and other tools to help content creators make engaging and impactful videos faster than ever before.

Still, one area of content creation is very confusing and trickier to harness than you might think. Finding the right music for your projects is a tall task. Not only is the search for the right music time-consuming, but finding music that you can properly license and safely use for all of your content needs is almost impossible for many.

That’s because there are an almost endless number of copyright laws, rules, and regulations for content creators to follow. Despite the intentions of many commercial music libraries online and built-in to apps like TikTok, these songs aren’t actually usable for other platforms and marketing needs.

So, if you’re looking for a primer on how to properly license music for use across all of your social video platforms and various marketing needs, here’s everything you need to know about music licensing. Plus, just because we like you, we’ll throw in several high-quality, royalty free music tracks that you can easily and safely use for all of your video projects moving forward.

The basics of music licensing

To start, let’s review some basic scary terms. Especially for those just starting out, terms like “music licensing,” “copyrights,” and “copyright infringement” can be frightening.

However, the most important thing is knowing that artists’ rights matter. If you’re a musician and you write a great song you upload online, you might be angered to find out that someone is using your track in a national broadcast television commercial.

You’d feel just as bad if your music was being used for profit or to promote something, and you weren’t seeing any residuals or payment for your work. And that’s the crux of music licensing.

To use music created by other artists in your content, whether for broadcast spots or your own YouTube videos, you should be giving credit where credit is due. And that’s where copyrights come in.

Here are some helpful resources on how the basics of music licensing work:

• What is Royalty Free Music?
• Do You Need a Music License for Public Domain Songs?
• The Details Everyone Should Know About Music Copyright
• How to License Music for Video
• Why You Should Be Wary About Using Copyrighted Music for Your Social Posts

How TikTok Commercial Music works

Now, as you might have seen when creating content directly in the TikTok app, you can use the “Commercial Music Library” offered by TikTok. This library is a selection of pre-cleared commercial-use music that is useful ONLY on TkTok.

Suppose you use an original sound or music from outside TikTok’s library. In that case, TikTok does require users to agree to their Music Usage confirmation when the content disclosure setting is turned on as a way to confirm that there’s no copyright-protected music in the video—or, if you are using copyrighted music, that you’ve obtained permission and paid for all the necessary licenses to use the music.

The big takeaway here, though, is that if you’re creating content just for TikTok, you can use the TikTok Commercial Music Library for your regular videos. However, if you’d like to use the same content elsewhere… Well, that’s a different question.

Can you use TikTok Commercial Music on other platforms like YouTube?

If you’re wondering, “Can I use TikTok music on Youtube and other platforms?”, the short and long answer here is “No.” If you use TikTok Commercial Music for your content, it is only covered to be used on TikTok. You cannot use TikTok Commercial Music on other platforms like YouTube. Furthermore, you can’t use the content with the TikTok Commercial Music on apps like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, or Twitch, nor can you use it for other marketing purposes.

This can cause a lot of confusion for those getting into content creation. TikTok encourages users to use Commercial Music for their videos as it’s an easy way to create them in the app. However, they also don’t have any incentive to help you use your videos anywhere else, so the copyright coverage they provide is only for use on TikTok.

If you’d like to create videos for TikTok that you can also use across other social video apps like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitch, etc, the TikTok music licensing won't work. Your only real option is royalty free music. And what’s that, you ask? Well, let us explain.

Using royalty free music on TikTok

As covered in our full guide on how to use copyrighted music on TikTok, the best and safest way to use copyrighted music on TikTok is to utilize royalty free music that you can download from music licensing companies like Soundstripe. These royalty free music tracks are all already pre-cleared and ready to use not just on TikTok but across all of your social media channels that you choose to post on.

The licensing process is simple, and the Soundstripe library has over 9,000 tracks. These tracks vary across numerous genres and styles to help ensure that you’ll always have the perfect song for your video’s needs.

At Soundstripe, we own every song in our library, so you can not only avoid copyright strikes, but you also won’t find our music on any other sites or libraries. You’ll have two options for licensing a song. You can either pay for a single song license and use that song in as many projects as you want, or you can sign up for one of our subscription plans, which gives you unlimited access to our entire library.

The best royalty free music for TikTok and other platforms

As mentioned above, your best bet for providing the soundtrack to your TikTok videos that you can still safely use across all other social video platforms and marketing channels is royalty free music provided by Soundstripe.

Not only do we have a full library of awesome royalty free music for you to browse, but we also have some hand-picked songs that we’d recommend you check out for yourself. 

• Description: A medium-energy, electronic song best described as fun and happy. Synths and samples are the primary instruments in this track.
• BPM: 100
• Key: Ab/G# Major
• Listen and license here.

• Description: A medium-energy, electronic song best described as hopeful and inspiring. Synth and piano are the primary instruments in this track.
• BPM: 103
• Key: Bb/A# Major
• Listen and license here.

• Description: A high-energy, score song best described as suspenseful and inspiring. Strings and cello are the primary instruments in this track.
• BPM: 170
• Key: E Minor
• Listen and license here.

• Description: A medium-energy rock song best described as happy and hopeful. The guitar and electric guitar are the primary instruments on this track.
• BPM: 124
• Key: Eb/D# Major
• Listen and license here.

• Description: A medium-energy, electronic song best described as chill and happy. Synths and drums are the primary instruments in this track.
• BPM: 102
• Key: Eb/D# Major
• Listen and license here.

You can further browse more of the best royalty free music for TikTok here. You can also check out some of the best royalty free sound effects for TikTok or simply explore how to add music to your TikTok videos here.