Did TikTok mute your video?

With so many creators having this issue, one would think there must be an easy to follow guide or tutorial.

I looked around and, even though I found some tutorials, most of them were either too wordy or not even offering any solution that actually worked.

So here I’ll be brief and to the point.

I will rely solely on my own experience, not some generic “best practices”.

Hi, I’m Mik, one of TunePocket music composers. If our clients experience any issues with using our royalty free music on YouTube, TikTok, or Facebook, I jump into action to find the solution that works! Keep reading!

Why TikTok videos get muted

I did quite a few experiments and see two main reasons:

Reason 1: TikTok found the matching song in their own library

Many musicians use digital distributors to send their music to the streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and so on.

Typically, the distributors also offer the option to send music to the music libraries hosted by the social media sites like TikTok or Facebook.

I found that whenever I use music that already exists in TikTok’s own library (even if I have all the necessary rights to use it), the video gets a copyright claim.

Reason 2: The video is longer than 60 sec and has background music

It appears that if you’re using copyrighted music and the length of the clip exceeds 60 sec TikTok will most likely mute your video.

Let’s see how you can (possibly) resolve the claim if your video was muted by TikTok.

How to resolve copyright claim on TikToks videos (according to TikTok and most online tutorials)

So what creators can do when TikTok slaps then with a copyright claim?

Unfortunately, TikTok does not offer a simple option for disputing music copyright claims!

Yes, you read this right.

Unlike YouTube or Facebook, TikTok does not offer a simple way to dispute copyright claims even if you have the permission from the copyright owner to use the music.

Or if you’re promoting your own music. As a musician, I can say, there’s nothing more annoying than getting copyright claims on my own music!

Related: how to quickly resolve copyright claims on YouTube.

Well, there is a copyright dispute form buried deep in TikTok’s support site.

It’s called Counter Notification Form.

Looks good but, unfortunately, there are a couple of issues with that form:

For once, it asks for a lot of information to fill.

But the main issue is that the “Report number” field is required and you don’t really get a report number along with the copyright claim.

In all of my experiments, whenever I got the claim there was NO Report number of any kind:

So what else can we do?

I ran some experiments and here are the results:

how I resolved copyright claim on my TikTok video (Step-by-step)

Here are my exact steps:

I uploaded a 1:39 long test video and got a copyright claim:

To resolve this claim, I tried two things:

One was to replace the claimed sound by the same sound from TikTok’s sounds library.

The other was to shorten the length of the video to under 60 sec.

Solution 1: Replace the music (worked for me)

To replace the music use TikTok’s built-in editor.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Find the same music in TikTok’s library and add it to the editor:

2. Mute the original sound.

3. Save the video.

Note that TikTok caps the length of the music at 60 sec.

It appears there’s no way around it.

Depending on the specifics of your video this may or may not be the best solution.

For example, if you uploaded a video (as opposed to recording it in the app) and mixed the music with dialogue or other sounds that’s clearly NOT the best option.

So if replacing the entire soundtrack isn’t working, try the other option – keep the video under 60 sec.

Solution 2: Keep the video under 60 sec (worked for me)

Another option that worked for me was to shorten the same video from 1:39 to 59 sec.

Here’s the result – no copyright claim even without replacing the original sound!

Hope this helps!

How to avoid copyright claims on long TikTok videos?

As you know, TikTok allows videos up to 10 min long.

So what you do if you want to post longer videos with music?

My initial idea was to simply keep each music clip under 60 sec. In theory that should be the same as using shorter videos, right?

Unfortunately, that did not work and I still got claims on all individual short clips.

As of today, I wasn’t able to find a reliable way to upload long videos with copyrighted music, even if each music clip was under 60 sec.

If you found a way please post it in the comments!

Questions or comments?

Share your experience with resolving TikTok copyright claims!

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