Universal Music Group (UMG), the company that represents artists including Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, says it will pull its music from TikTok at midnight tomorrow after failing to reach an agreement with the parent platform company, ByteDance, for the rights. .
UMG will not seek to renew its current deal with TikTok, which expires on January 31, and plans to stop licensing content for both TikTok and its music-focused service, TikTok Music.
In a press release, UMG blamed TikTok — which According to reports made nearly $20 billion in ad revenue last year — from trying to build a “music-based business without paying fair value for [artists’] MUSIC.”
“TikTok has proposed that we pay our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate paid by major social media platforms of a similar location,” the company He wrote. “Today, as a sign of how little TikTok is compensating artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly growing advertising revenue and growing reliance on music-based content, TikTok only accounts for about 1% of our total revenue”.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As UMG puts it in the press release, TikTok and did not deal with payments for AI-generated recordings using UMG properties. In addition, TikTok did not take appropriate steps to quickly remove content in violation of the label’s copyright, UMG says.
“Ultimately TikTok is trying to build a music-based business without paying fair value for music,” UMG wrote.
UMG’s current contract with TikTok runs through 2021 and covers recorded music by artists on UMG labels and songwriters associated with Universal Music Publishing Group. As part of the deal, UMG and TikTok agreed to experiment with new features, such as allowing users to embed clips from UMG’s full music catalog spanning Bad Bunny, SZA, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles, Justin Bieber , Adele, U2 and Elton John.
The deal with UMG comes as TikTok leans more towards music creation and curation.
The platform positions TikTok Music, which launched last year in select countries, as a serious rival to Spotify and Apple Music. Meanwhile, TikTok is piloting an “AI Song” feature that uses AI to create songs based on user-entered prompts.
While TikTok has shown a willingness to work with some labels on terms it deems favorable — the platform was According to reports in talks with Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and UMG “year-round” in 2022 and 2023 for a share of its ad revenue — isn’t shy about throwing its weight around where it sees fit. Last February, TikTok removed major label music from its service for a subset of users in Australia in an apparent test to see how user engagement would be affected.
Recently, TikTok has sought exclusive distribution deals with musicians for ByteDance’s SoundOn service, which is distributed directly to TikTok and music streaming services. He has also launched a program, called Elevate, designed to identify the next wave of up-and-coming artists in the music industry.
