Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and more music could soon disappear from TikTok

The girls are fighting, and the “girls” in question are two of the largest media companies in the world.

On Monday, Universal Music Group (UMG) – a leading music publishing group for artists including Taylor Swift – released a statement threatening to remove her music from the social media platform TikTok. UMG says its contract with TikTok expires on Wednesday and that the social media platform’s leaders failed to negotiate a deal that adequately compensates artists and addresses other concerns. Now the breakdown in contract negotiations may have an impact on UMG’s hundreds of musicians and songwriters TikTok’s 1 billion users.

At the moment the situation still seems to be in flux. We will update this story as more information becomes available. However, it is currently likely that globally popular artists – such as Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny – will officially take their music off the platform. Here’s everything you need to know about the deal between TikTok and Universal Music Group.

Why is Universal Music Group taking their music off TikTok?

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This whole problem arises because of one key factor: UMG’s contract with TikTok expires on January 31st. We don’t know the depth or exact terms of this contract or other similar contracts – these contracts are kept as confidential agreements between companies – but we at least understand that the document contains contractual obligations that determine numbers like royalties. The contract expiration date has been reached and the two companies have not been able to reach an agreement. UMG made its concerns public during contract negotiations Statement criticizing TikTok.

Honest? UMG high-up sound drunk. In an open letter published Tuesday discussing the fallout from the contract negotiations, the company described three key areas of concern in the contract negotiations: musician and writer compensation, artist protections regarding the use of AI, and the online safety of TikTok users general. While the statement addresses each concern point by point, the larger narrative is that TikTok has grown and benefited from the work of musicians and has now failed to deliver a deal that supports artists and songwriters pay their contributions appropriately.

According to UMG, TikTok’s success is “based in large part on the music of our artists and songwriters.” Despite this success, according to UMG, TikTok proposed paying its singers and songwriters “at a rate that is only a fraction of the rate that “Similarly positioned large social platforms pay”. Although UMG doesn’t provide examples of these phrases, it does say that TikTok only accounted for 1% of the company’s total revenue. So the basic idea is that UMG isn’t profiting from a social media company that has grown in recent years in part because of its music.

The statement addresses the point above, but also touches on other concerns about the way TikTok manages its platform. UMG said TikTok has been “flooded with AI-generated recordings,” and UMG’s statement goes on to describe how TikTok has developed tools that enable, encourage and encourage the creation of AI music on the platform. According to UMG, this will be “massively watered down”.[s] the human artist royalty pool, a move that amounts to nothing other than sponsoring the replacement of artists by AI.”

The letter then gets to a larger point and concerns TikTok’s failure to moderate its platform. The UMG statement said TikTok “makes little effort to address the massive amounts of content on its platform that hurts our artists’ music,” as well as “the tidal wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment on the platform Platform “inadequately moderated”. Platform.” As if all that wasn’t enough, the strongly worded statement takes one last major swipe at TikTok by accusing the company of pressuring UMG to make a worse deal by “selling the music of certain of ours “Selectively removing emerging artists while keeping our audience on the platform – driving global stars.”

How does TikTok react to Universal Music Group?

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TikToks reaction to the matter was scarce compared to the UMG letter. The company’s statement said it was “sad and disappointing that UMG has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.” According to TikTok, UMG has decided to move away from a platform that “serves as a free promotion and discovery tool for their talent.” The company also mentioned that it was “able to enter into artist-first agreements with every other label and publisher.”

Which musicians are being removed from TikTok?

UMG represents hundreds of music acts worldwide. You can browse a catalog of musicians and songwriters on its website; The list includes major acts like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Rosalía and Lady Gaga. All of these musicians will be removed from TikTok if the two companies cannot reach an agreement.

What does this mean for TikTok users?

It is important to emphasize that nothing is final yet. We don’t know exactly when the contract will expire or if there will be a grace period for ongoing negotiations; It is possible that the two companies could reach a last-minute agreement after the disagreement was announced. Polygon checked and TikTok still contains several tracks from UMG artists at the time of publication. However, if the contract expires on January 31st – most likely at midnight – UMG will remove its catalog from TikTok.

Photo: Buda Mendes/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

We don’t know how long it would take to implement such a change on the TikTok side, since UMG represents so many artists on the platform. In theory, if UMG removes its entire catalog from TikTok and requires the social media platform to enforce this change, users will no longer be able to use officially licensed recordings on the platform to create videos. If a video previously posted on TikTok originally used the official recording of a removed song, the video is likely to be without sound and silent – as is the case with other videos that have had songs or sounds removed in the past.

To give you an example of what impact this could have: the official recording of Taylor Swift’s song “karma“has been used more than 102,000 times on TikTok. If the deal falls through, all of these videos could go silent afterward. Aside from that, there are plenty of unlicensed recordings of songs that constantly go viral on the platform. So you might still hear your favorite Taylor Swift song, but it’ll be less common and subject to a DMCA notice if the original uploader gets caught.

Overall, the situation is chaotic. It’s hard to imagine TikTok without music from some of the world’s most popular artists. Taylor Swift and other artists have become global phenomena thanks in large part to the fandoms that grew on platforms like TikTok. Only time will tell how this all turns out and what impact it will ultimately have.