If the two more than famous companies don’t come to a new agreement, Universal Music will withdraw the licenses of their tracks from the social media platform TikTok. The platform is also home to stars like Taylor Swift and Drake. And this move will have massive consequences especially on young artists who are trying to grow on TikTok. Will that effect the user numbers of TikTok?
The reason for this step by Universal
The record company accused TikTok, one of the biggest social media platforms, that they would offer unsatisfactory payments for music and their artists. Moreover they said that the platform was “flooded with A.I.-generated recordings” that would effect the artists and their reputation. After that on Thursday, TikTok confirmed that they pulled of all the songs from Universal Music.
In response to the steps taken from Universal, TikTok said that Universal Music use ” their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters”. Moreover Universal would “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”
This is not the first time that a major music company has a conflict with tech platforms. In 2008 Warner music pulled thousands of music videos from YouTube and demanded to get a stake of the advertising revenue. This left artists of the company without any promotions from YouTube.
The impact on artists if Universal Music pulls of songs
TikTok has the power to take songs from artists who don’t have a lot of exposure and make them famous. It can also bring back decades-old classics, like the 1977 song “Dreams”. It became famous on TikTok in 2020. The disagreement between Universal and TikTok meant that all artists signed to Universal Music had the opportunity to become famous on TikTok. This affects a lot of artists as Universal is the biggest of the three major record companies.
On TikTok people can’t use sounds from artists like Lana Del Ray, Taylor Swift, Drake, U2 or Ariana Grande. The songs of the artists don’t show on their profile either anymore. And Videos that use sounds from artists of Universal are silent, only under the video it shows a short phrase that says something like, “Sound removed due to copyright restrictions” or “This sound is not available”. Ariana Grande will publish a new album next month and if the sound of the songs won’t be available on TikTok this might have a bad influence on the popularity of it.
Will TikTok suffer because of this?
There are two major outcomes that could happen. One is that the two companies agree on a new contract and everything can go back to normal for all the artists or the two companies don’t agree on a new contract. That will leave artists with a big loss of listeners due to the popularity of the social media platform TikTok.
If the two companies don’t agree on a new contract soon, the only thing that is left for artists is to promote their music on other platforms. This will leave TikTok with less engagement from music artists. It might also mean that users switch to other platforms to listen to songs from their favorite artists. If that happens, TikTok could loose its reputation as one of the biggest social media platforms and it might go down just as fast as it grew.
But maybe the two companies will in fact agree on a new contract and the artists from Universal Music can continue to publish their music on TikTok. That would be great for artists and for TikTok, since artists have the opportunity to grow and TikTok can display the music and keep users. But we don’t know what the companies will agree on so everything that is left for us, especially for the artists, is to hope for a new contract.
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