Songs by Taylor Swift, Drake, Beyoncé and lots of extra up to date music superstars have vanished en masse from TikTok after Universal Music Group severed ties with the social media big following a contentious contract dispute.
A search of Swift’s viral hit “Cruel Summer” now comes up empty on TikTok, the place the track’s audio not too long ago sparked a pattern that led to its utilization in over 2.5 million movies. The identical goes for searches of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights,” which had been utilized in practically two million movies. “This sound isn’t available,” the positioning reads.
UMG wields the world’s largest music catalog and its departure from TikTok leaves the platform bereft of tens of millions of the favored songs with which its creators document content material. Existing movies with UMG-owned audio embedded at the moment are muted however stay on customers’ accounts, albeit with out sound.
However, TikTok is totally licensed and has agreements in place with all different main and unbiased labels, sources near the social media platform confirmed to EDM.com. Those sources additionally inform us TikTok argued that it’s “not a music streaming platform and should not be licensed as such.”
The music’s removing is the upshot of the erosion of licensing discussions between TikTok and UMG, the latter of which in the end shared a scathing open latter. They mentioned that negotiations collapsed after urging TikTok to handle “three critical issues — appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users.”
UMG additionally claimed that TikTok “attempted to bully” them right into a proposed deal that may’ve paid its musicians and songwriters “a fraction” of the quantity disbursed by different social media platforms, including that the app contains roughly 1% of its complete income. The two corporations’ current settlement expired on January thirty first.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech firm Bytedance, responded to UMG’s open letter within the wake of its launch and accused them of placing “their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”
“Despite Universal’s false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent,” reads TikTok’s assertion. “TikTok has been able to reach ‘artist-first’ agreements with every other label and publisher. Clearly, Universal’s self-serving actions are not in the best interests of artists, songwriters and fans.”
TikTok is predicted to succeed in two billion customers by the top of 2024, per Business of Apps.
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