The biggest music label in the world, Universal Music Group, which represents singers like Adele, BTS, Drake, and Taylor Swift, has declared that it will no longer be licensing music to the social video app TikTok.
The announcement coincides with the failure of TikTok and UMG, which controls a third of the world music market, to agree on new terms for a music licensing deal after their current one ended yesterday. Fair compensation for UMG’s songwriters and artists, defense against AI-generated content, and worries about safety and infringement are only a few reasons for this contract failure. UMG asserted that TikTok, which generates about 1% of its total revenue, offered a new contract that was lower than fair market value and less valuable than the old one. Additionally, UMG asserted that TikTok’s policy on AI-generated music will reduce royalties for songwriters and performers who are human.
UMG even wrote a letter titled: “An Open Letter to the Artist and Songwriter Community Why We Must Call Time Out on TikTok”. Some notable lines from this letter are,
“Our core mission is simple: to help our artists and songwriters attain their greatest creative and commercial potential. To achieve these goals, our teams employ their expertise and passion to strike deals with partners all around the world, partners who take seriously their responsibilities to fairly compensate our artists and songwriters and treat the user experience with respect…
Ultimately TikTok is trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music…
We will always fight for our artists and songwriters and stand up for the creative and commercial value of music.”
Music appears in about 60% of TikTok videos, which promotes discoverability and occasionally propels songs to the tops of many charts. In the absence of an agreement, TikTok will be compelled to remove almost 4 million UMG-affiliated songs off its platform, rendering such music inaccessible to users.
With UMG removing the 4 million affiliated songs, TikTok creators will have to get creative with the way that they catch viewers attention. Music has a profound impact on attention spans, acting as a cognitive enhancer in various contexts. Background music has been found to improve concentration and information retention. Musical elements have the capacity to optimize cognitive performance and foster sustained attention. With the removal of songs made by popular artists like Taylor Swift, content creators might resort to not using music altogether for the sake of “staying on trend” and not use obscure music. The attention span of viewers might be affected by this as they endlessly scroll down the bottomless pit that is TikTok, not that they’re not doing that already.
Fair compensation is crucial in a field like music when very little fruitful opportunity is presented to artists, so it’s uplifting to see large companies like UMG stand up for artists and their craft (all things considered though, UMG does benefit from a larger contract, but we take the wins where we can get them). Hopefully TikTok is able to sort out a deal with UMG, otherwise they’re going to have some very silent videos.
