Have you gone on TikTok and watched a video that was not only captivating because of the content portrayed but also because there was a catchy song or beat in the background? You’re definitely not alone. Part of what’s made TikTok an excellent platform has been the ability to make songs or beats incredibly trendy, and people want to find them!
A great song has often been proven to cause chances of going viral on TikTok to skyrocket, as their data has shown that “sound is the anti-scroll on TikTok”. It’s not hard to see why, as people like to listen to things that they enjoy. While this isn’t completely synonymous with TikTok, as other platforms also have growth from audio-based videos, over 70% of users on TikTok say they would listen to ads with audio, a higher number than the other platforms.
In this article, we’ll go through our research on how to find trending sounds and audio on TikTok, as well as tools that can help you identify what those sounds might be.
How to find trending sounds on TikTok
TikTok users are eight times more likely to remember a brand for the unique sounds or songs that they feature, rather than the ad or slogan itself. This makes finding sounds that your audience will gravitate towards imperative.
TikTok Search
Far and away, the easiest way to find trending sounds on TikTok is through their Search feature. Simply follow these steps, and your journey to find great audio will get to work!
- Open up your TikTok app
- Search for either Trending Sounds or Trending Audio
- Once the results are loaded, go to the Sounds tab
- You’ll see a list of trending sounds and songs on TikTok and how often they’ve been used
You can even go a little deeper by using the search filters available. We like to start with the Date Posted filter, which allows you to search in the past 24 hours, the past week, the past month, three months, or six months.
There is a graphic that shows a great way to see where the trending sounds may go, and it can tell you which stage of trendiness a TikTok sound is in. We’ll touch on that a bit later.
By searching in the last 24 hours, you can get an idea of the sounds that are currently trending, but these sounds might not have hit their highest point of trendiness just yet, so you may be putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.
If you look in the past week, you can really start to get an idea of where the trending sound is going, and you get a clear idea and picture of how the trend is developing.
Going even further back, you can select a month to see what is probably the best indicator of how trendy a song or sound is on TikTok. By this point, the sound has been trending for a long enough period of time that you can see that it has long-term staying power, and is a very good option for your video.
Posting dates is not the only method of testing, as you can also filter trending sounds by relevance and like count. If you filter by relevance, you are getting the songs or sounds that are most relevant to the
When you filter by like count, you are obviously going to get the trending sounds and songs that have been liked the most, which gives you an accurate view of how popular that they are.
TikTok Creative Center
The TikTok Creative Center is a free, public resource that provides tools and inspiration for creating, optimizing, and analyzing TikTok ads. Here, you can discover the latest trends, ad examples, best practices, and tools to create effective TikToks. Specifically, the four things the creative center focuses on are
- Hashtags
- Songs
- Creators
- Specific Videos
Hashtags
One of the easiest ways to discover new trends on TikTok is through hashtags, as people will put them on their videos to draw you to them. Inside of the Creative Center, you can find the hashtags that are popular right now, and you can also find some of the following things by clicking on the analytics button:
- The interest over time
- Related videos using that hashtag
- Audience insights
- Trending creators that have used that hashtag
Songs
Songs and sounds that are trending on TikTok is another great feature of the Creative Center. You can sort the songs here by either Popular, a ranked list of the songs in the timeframe and region you selected, or Breakout, which is a ranked list of songs growing at a rapid rate.
When you click on the analytics button, you’ll again find audience insights, related videos, and you can also find similar, ready-to-use music.
Creators
Everyone wants to connect with the hottest creators on TikTok! Now you can, with this feature of the Creative Center.
When you visit this page, you’ll be able to see the top creators on TikTok, how many followers they have, and the recent videos that they’ve done. You can sort this by region too, so this tool helps you see what creators are making what videos.
Specific Videos
Lastly, you can find inspiration for your new content by searching through the Trending Videos on the Creative Center. Sorting by either the last week or month, as well as what’s hot, has the most likes, comments, or shares, you can view what videos are currently doing well on TikTok and how to emulate that.
Tokchart
Would you like to be able to see songs and sounds on TikTok BEFORE they go viral? Tokchart does exactly that, offering you a dashboard that features a variety of tools that can lead you to songs or sounds that will get big, including:
- Trend Graphs, to spot songs moving up in popularity
- Sound Matching, to match sounds to the original track and artist
- Custom Filters, to help you find any type of song no matter how obscure
- Exclusive Statistics, to see the number of views and likes for each sound over time
Keep in mind that this Dashboard is part of Tokchart’s premium offering, which we’ll detail more below, but here are some of the excellent free features as well!
Tokchart tracks the trending songs in the US and by country as well and categorizes them by month, this week, or last week. As you’ll see in the image below, you can what was trending at a certain time period in a certain part of the world, which really helps you narrow what your focus should be if you live in that region.
Another cool feature on Tokchart is Trending Hashtags, which allows you to see the most used and popular hashtags on TikTok at this moment. It tells you what countries the hashtag is trending in and you can also sort by country as well.
Growing Sounds is a feature of Tokchart that I view as crucial for TikTok. We mentioned how Tokchart allows you to spot songs and sounds BEFORE they go viral.
This feature lists out the 30 fastest growing sounds and songs on TikTok currently, updated daily, and gives you the ability to hear the sound and see the stats and analytics behind it. The analytics are part of Tokchart’s premium plan, which costs $9.85/month and allows you the following:
- Exclusive detailed song statistics
- Unlimited top trending and top growing charts
- Historical stats for each song
- Save your favorite songs
- Get 75% off reports
- Access to the full Dashboard
Lastly, Trending Filters list the most popular filters on TikTok across the past 24 hours, listing out the amount of users that have used that filter on a video.
Tokboard
Tokboard is another website that offers the ability to see a list of the past week’s most popular TikTok songs. However, it is not currently being updated.
This isn’t a dealbreaker to use it, however. In fact, Tokboard is a very useful tool because its main purpose going forward will be to figure out old trends from specific time periods.
This is important because old trends tend to repeat themselves when it comes to time periods. For example, the easy one to throw out here is that the months of November and December tend to be dominated by Christmassy sounds and music.
Follow creators who post about viral trends
Some content creators make content that is based around viral trends. This is a great way to find trending sounds on TikTok because who better to find those sounds than going through creators that have built a platform off of it? Here are some of our favorites that we found:
Brett Wolkey is a creator with over 1.2 million followers who focuses on talking about the best songs that he finds. He usually makes these series, whether they’re breaking down country songs, rap songs, or his favorite EDM playlist.
MMXVII is an artist with 325K followers on TikTok. Most of his videos detail viral sounds that you can use to help blow up your own videos, but he also has videos on him reviewing music pieces that people send into his Discord as well as his favorite songs for that current week.
Jarred Jermaine is the self-described “ceo of music and audio knowledge”, as illustrated on his TikTok profile. He does a bit of everything when it comes to trending sounds, from creating videos to help people figure out the details behind trending songs and sounds on the app to reviewing trending sounds and songs that are popular.
Checking YouTube or Spotify
You can also use YouTube and/or Spotify to help you find trending sounds or songs for your TikTok. Doing this is incredibly simple.
All that you need to do is type ‘TikTok’ into the search browser on either platform and it’ll show you a list of them. Alternatively, TikTok has its own Spotify profile that has curated playlists for whatever region that you’re searching for.
If you check out the graphic below, you’ll see one of these playlists, which contains 200 tracks that were deemed trending in 2024 by TikTok
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, discovering trending sounds on TikTok is key to maximizing engagement and boosting the chances of your content going viral. By using tools like TikTok’s search feature, the Creative Center, and external resources like Tokchart and Tokboard, users can stay ahead of trends and tap into the songs that resonate most with the TikTok community.
Additionally, following creators who specialize in viral trends or checking platforms like YouTube and Spotify for trending audio can help identify fresh sounds before they peak. Ultimately, the right sound can significantly impact your TikTok success, making it crucial to keep up with the latest audio trends and leverage them to enhance your content.
