In a very interesting legal, creative, social experiment development in the TikTok/socials/licensing world, Universal Music Group has pulled all sounds on TikTok! This is particularly interesting because TikTok was formerly musical.ly, 100% geared towards dancing videos and music.
TikTok has obviously transformed a TON since the musical.ly days, but with United Music Group pulling their sounds from the app, millions of videos are now completely muted throughout the app. This means even videos where the creator is speaking and has the artist’s sound in the background no longer has sound.
Creators on TikTok often build their entire following covering music news (especially Swifties) so entire accounts effectively lost years of their videos overnight.
When it comes to music usage on social platforms, YouTube has always been the most protective. This highlights why YouTube is considered an evergreen form of content creation compared to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok where creators often have little control over video performance, trends, and algorithm changes.
Taylor Swift has always fought for musical artists to get compensated fairly on streaming services (ever since she changed the way Apple Music pays artists during their initial launch)
However, this is coming from UMG and not Taylor. Swifties argue Taylor would never want her most dedicated fans to lose all of their content overnight like this (some of which lost their livelihood). But is what UMG doing going to help smaller artists in the long run by requiring TikTok to pay up? Does the announcement of Taylor’s newest album, The Tortured Poets Department and much-anticipated release of Reputation (Taylor’s Version) have anything to do with the timing of the UMG pull??
In the short term, it’s appeared many smaller artists are actually negatively affected. They have begun recording acoustic versions of their songs on TikTok in an effort to encourage creators to continue using their music. While other non-UMG musicians have created videos reminding fans that their music is still on TikTok and can be used instead.
Time will tell what the impact will be of this shift, but it is an interesting development from a social media, content creation, IP rights, and PR perspective!
I know this isn’t our typical content, but as creators that cover live music as our job and whose preferred social media app is TikTok… we’ll be following this story closely!