The new frontier in the war against the devaluation of music has opened between TikTok and Universal Music Group. On 1 February, reports emerged that the social media platform would be forced to remove a vast swathe of music owned by Universal from its platform as the two music industry titans failed to come to a licensing agreement that would see Universal get paid every time its music was used for a TikTok video. While the headlines have been caught up with the big names signed by Universal – Drake, Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, and many others – the issue goes beyond them.
The Universal and TikTok dispute concerns publishing -the rights of those who wrote the songs- as well as just records. Thus, even if a songwriter who wrote just 1 per cent of a song is signed to Universal, that song has now been removed from the app. The result of the dispute is devastating for all involved, not least the artists at the core of the problem, as a third of TikTok’s former music catalogue has been stripped.
Artists have expressed a mixed response to the issue. Jack Antonoff, the most influential force in music of the last 10 years, Lorde, Taylor Swift, and who collaborated with big names such as The 1975, expressed that artists simply shouldn’t get used to being paid less. This is demonstrably the issue at hand: the number of emerging artists able to make a career out of their music has collapsed since the advent of streaming. The amount TikTok pays is even less than streaming services; the logic being that people don’t use the platform for listening to music, as it is not a streaming platform and therefore does not have to match even the pitiful sums ($0.005 per stream) coughed up by Spotify.
The idea of TikTok not having music as its central appeal is blatantly untrue. TikTok ran a test last year by removing certain artists from the platform for a brief period in Australia to prove to the music industry how little their music is worth to the platform and how TikTok can thrive without music. They were proved wrong: a noted decline in the number of active users of the platform was reported.
For emergent artists, TikTok remains a vengeful god, being crucial for music promotion. TikTok is the primary promotional tool in the modern music industry; in 2022, 13 out of 14 number 1 Billboard singles were driven by virality on TikTok. Universal has no choice but to come to an agreement quickly, as artists will simply stop releasing music until they can promote it on TikTok. It is therefore difficult to imagine that this will end up being a revolutionary event.
Whilst they may not be the beginning of a new era, the months ahead still represent opportunity: independent artists are now on a more equal footing without competition from the ruthlessly promoted signed artists attached to Universal, which might see more tracks like the independent Ocean Alleys’s “Confidence” gaining traction, as has happened recently. Additionally, those willing to continue putting out music will become more dependent on more traditional areas of promotion, like music blogs, magazines, and live music, and depending on how long universal strikes for, could give rise to previously unheard-of methods of promotion.
Neither TikTok nor Universal are the good guys here. Despite painting themselves as knights in shining armour in valiant defence of its artists, some contest that the only reason Universal has not taken similar issue with not-so-lucrative licensing agreements with streamers is because it owns profitable chunks of streaming platforms like Spotify. Universal will survive the winter. But for smaller artists on already meagre incomes, the consequences could be dire. We can only hope that if Universal can end the dispute with a more ‘artist-first’ licensing agreement, it may open the doors for more advantageous deals with streamers that will leave artists better off.
Image Credits: “Universal Studio’s logo” by akademy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.