What happens when you remove all of a music label’s music from TikTok?
Turns out when you strip out all the popular music from artists like Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Bon Jovi, Billie Eilish, Tears for Fears, and Lana Del Rey it’s just a bunch of people dancing to silence.
This all happened when Universal Music Group (UMG) and TikTok’s discussions regarding licensing their music collection collapsed, forcing UMG to remove their music resulting in millions of videos on TikTok being muted.
As you can imagine, some TikTok content creators are melting down and don’t know what to do with themselves. In some cases we’re talking about their only source of income disappearing overnight.
A word of caution: maybe don’t build your business on content you don’t own and control. This same thing happens when someone sells 100% of their products on Etsy, and then their account gets banned. Diversify people!
No word yet on how long UMG will pull their music from TikTok for, but negotiations are ongoing.
The heart of the issue comes down to the licensing of music by TikTok from Universal Music Group. As you can imagine both sides see the issue differently.
UMG put out a statement saying “Ultimately TikTok is trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music.”
Then TikTok put out a statement saying “It is sad and disappointing that Universal Music Group has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”
Who’s right, and who’s wrong? It’s tough to come out and say either side is categorically right or wrong in my opinion.
On one side, artists should 100% be compensated for their music, which is essentially art that they created. On the other hand I can see TikTok’s perspective that they want to reach a fair financial deal to license music.
In the end it’s not only the content creators on TikTok, as well as the consumers of that content, that are getting hurt while two big corporations negotiate over royalties.
See, I told you the issue wasn’t so cut-and-dry.
Taylor Swift’s label UMG to pull music from TikTok, accusing the app of bullying