Over the past four years, TikTok has become a leading hub for music discovery, with users incorporating both iconic and emerging songs into viral video content.

To help artists
and labels that are ,.m susceptible to copyright infringement, the social platform’s music marketing and distribution partner SoundOn has launched an enhanced detection service.

Originally
partnering with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance in 2022, SoundOn allows artists to upload their music directly to TikTok and earn royalties when their songs are played.

Now, SoundOn is
implementing a “Derivative Works Detection” service built by AI-powered music detection company ARCCloud to help music distributors and music streaming platforms to identify copyrighted
tracks in their catalogs, even if the tracks have been modified by content creators.

The new service from ACRCloud is designed to offer “an extra layer of anti-fraud detection”
into SoundOn’s previous detection rollouts on TikTok, introducing pre- and post-distribution reviews of every track, as well as human review and customer identification processes via photo ID
requirements.

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The Derivative Works Detection’s pre-distribution technology will work in conjunction with TikTok’s in-house scanning technology for a multi-signal detection framework.

By integrating ACRCloud’s new detection system, TikTok and SoundOn hope to reduce the risk of unauthorized uploads, helping ensure that content delivered to digital service providers is
“original, authorised, and trusted,” per SoundOn’s announcement.

Over 1 million artists have registered with TikTok’s SoundOn as of late 2025, with “hundreds of
thousands” of acts releasing music and generating revenue on the platform, according to Music Business Worldwide.

The attempt
to better protect artists’ property in the age of AI comes at a time when TikTok is expanding its original music offerings with live singing competitions, in-app genre-specific music hubs,
distribution platform partnerships and even a recently launched radio and podcast
programming in partnership with iHeartMedia.