• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

TikTok says its live coverage of Belgium's electronic music festival Tomorrowland broke all previous records for an audience watching a live event on the video-sharing platform, attracting over 74 million unique viewers across both festival weekends.

The ByteDance-owned company’s previous Tomorrowland livestream, which occurred in 2023, attracted 16 million viewers, almost 5x less than this year’s turnout. Additional content related to this year’s festival was viewed more than 2.4 billion times over the two weeks, TikTok says.

Despite competing with other popular music and cultural festivals, such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, or Primavera, Tomorrowland now ranks as TikTok’s biggest festival account, with over 9.2 million followers – an increase of almost two million users over this year’s two-week run.

“Artists that partnered with TikTok at Tomorrowland either via the MainStage LIVE stream or content studio, gained an additional 3 million followers and received over 580 million video views across their festival content,” TikTok says.

Tomorrowland’s most-watched artists on TikTok form this year’s festival included Belgian DJ and producer Charlotte de Witte, who played twice on the MainStage in a single day; as well as Dutch DJ Martin Garrix, who also headlined the MainStage twice; and Norwegian DJ Alan Walker.

Per a recent statement, TikTok’s content partnership with Tomorrowland offered “24/7 festival live streams, behind-the-scenes access, artist and creator collaborations, and interactive fan experiences” via the dedicated #Tomorrowland TikTok hub.

Prior to the festival, TikTok’s music distribution and promotion service, SoundOn, joined forces with Tomorrowland’s label, Tomorrowland Music, to host a songwriting camp which led to emerging artists performing new tracks for the first time at the festival.

Electronic music is thriving on TikTok, having become one of the most popular genres on a platform known for music discovery. TikTok says posts tagged with #electronicmusic have been viewed over 36 billion times. Last year, the app’s dedicated electronic music hub launched after TikTok noticed posts including this hashtag grew 70% year-over-year.

TikTok plans on expanding coverage to Tomorrowland’s slate of live music properties, including “Unity” at the Las Vegas Sphere, Tomorrowland Brazil, Tomorrowland Winter, and more.