Last January, Olivia King sat at her dining room table and made a beat — in five minutes. The Rhode Island-based pop/R&B artist doesn’t play instruments or use music-production software. Instead, she created her track with Overtune, a music-making app that allows users to combine beats and samples from a wide range of instruments and other sounds, write and record vocals, and otherwise use a simple smartphone interface to make music meant to soundtrack content on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
Overtune was developed in Iceland and launched in 2020. Now, King’s use of the app is helping expand Overtune’s applications beyond social platforms and into more traditional releases. After using Overtune to add her own vocals to her five-minute beat, she made a video of herself performing the song snippet, then posted it to TikTok as part of a brand deal with the app.
The video started racking up views; it now has more than 10 million of them. Capitalizing on this interest, King created an entire song based on her original minute-long TikTok. A steamy ballad called “Unfinished Business,” the two-minute, 18-second song was made entirely with Overtune beat packs and released last Friday (June 21).
It marks the first release through Overtune’s new label service, which is centered on a partnership with SoundOn, the music distribution model launched by TikTok in 2022 in the U.S. and U.
K. Building SoundOn into Overtune “fits directly into the changing music in.
