How to export TikTok sounds to a spreadsheet

Search for "trending TikTok sounds" and you get listicles: a few dozen tracks someone picked last week, with no numbers attached and nothing about your niche. That is fine for inspiration. It is no help when a client asks why you chose this track over that one. For that you need the sounds as rows, with a count you can sort by.

What a sound export gives you

One row per sound that matches your search. Each row has the sound's id, its title, the credited artist, how many public videos use it, its length, a link to the audio and its cover art. The column that does the work is post_count: the number of public videos built on that sound when the search ran.

Step by step

1. Open the sound exporter and search a keyword, a track name or an artist. Keywords from your niche ("gym", "skincare", "study") work as well as song titles.
2. Pick how many sounds to pull: 100, 250 or up to 500. Relevance drops off quickly toward the end of a search, so the smaller pulls are often the more useful ones.
3. Download the list as Excel, CSV or JSON when the job finishes.
4. Sort by post_count, largest first. The top of that sheet is the set of sounds with the most videos behind them for your search.

Excel, CSV or JSON?

Pick Excel if you will open the file in Excel or upload it to Google Sheets. Sound ids are 19 digits long, and a spreadsheet that reads them from a CSV as numbers keeps only the first 15 and rounds the rest, which quietly breaks any lookup by id. The Excel download stores ids as text and counts as numbers, so both behave. Pick CSV for tools that read text files, and JSON when code is going to read it.

Big is not the same as rising

post_count is a running total. A sound with 2 million videos may have peaked a year ago; one with 8,000 may be doubling every week. One export tells you which sounds are established. To see which are rising, you need two exports of the same search, a week apart.

1. Run the same search once a week and paste each export into its own tab, named by date.
2. In the newest tab, add a column that looks up each sound's count from last week by its id. With the id in column A and post_count in column D, that is =XLOOKUP(A2, LastWeek!A:A, LastWeek!D:D, 0).
3. Add a growth column: this week minus last week, divided by last week. A sound that was not in last week's export shows as new, which is worth a look on its own.
4. Sort by growth. The sounds near the top, with a modest total and a steep climb, are the ones still early enough to be worth using.

Match on the id, never the title. Titles repeat (there are a lot of sounds called "original sound"), but an id points at one sound only.

Using it for a client

A short brief works better than the raw sheet: the five fastest risers in the client's niche, last week's and this week's counts, and a sentence on how each one is being used. Open a few videos per sound before you recommend it, because a sound's count says nothing about whether the videos using it suit a brand.

If you post from a business account, TikTok limits you to sounds cleared for commercial use. Check that a sound is available to the account before you build a brief around it.

Limits worth knowing

Sound export starts on Pro, which includes 50 sound searches a month. Each search returns up to 500 sounds. The audio links in the export are the ones TikTok serves, and they expire after a while, so treat them as a preview rather than a copy. tikklip stores the metadata and links, never the audio itself. Use the sounds the way TikTok allows them to be used, inside TikTok.

Comments are the other half of the picture. Once you know which sounds to use, the comments under the top videos tell you how people feel about them; the method is in how to research TikTok comments for a campaign.