UMG Removes Music From Tiktok

Naomi Herbert writes about the controversy surrounding Universal Music Group's decision to stop supplying TikTok with music.

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TikTok, the popular short-form content platform, is best known for its music. From boosting artists to stardom like Doja Cat and Tate McRae to popularizing hundreds of songs, the platform relies on audio. However, recently, UMG (Universal Music Group) removed all of their artists' music from the platform, around 4 million songs, second to Sony.

UMG is a music publishing company that owns record labels like Interscope, Republic Records, Capitol Music Group, Geffen, and A&M. In total, they hold over a thousand artists in over 60 countries. On January 30th, UMG announced in an open letter that on January 31st, their contract with TikTok expires, and they won't be renewing it for several reasons. One of those reasons is the heavy usage of AI on their platform, and their refusal to moderate it. In the statement, they said, “On AI, TikTok is allowing the platform to be flooded with AI-generated recordings—as well as developing tools to enable, promote and encourage AI music creation on the platform itself – and then demanding a contractual right which would allow this content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists, in a move that is nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI.” UMG also stated that TikTok doesn't effectively moderate its platform as a whole, letting harmful content slide through the cracks and content that breaks copyright laws.

UMG also accuses TikTok of trying to intimidate UMG into accepting a bad deal by removing music from their smaller, developing artists on the platform. They also talk about the low compensation TikTok gives artists, being only %1 of UMG’s total revenue.

FHS Students don’t agree with either UMG or TikTok. When asked about the situation, an FHS Student stated, “I feel like it was a mix of UMG being money hungry and TikTok doing a horrible job maintaining their reputation-I think it's a failure on both sides as TikTok has lost a lot of its most significant communities such as editors and music fanbases.”

While this is only one major music publisher, this sets a precedent for other publishers like Sony and Warner to do a similar thing. Independent labels and artists may also follow suit since revenue from their music on TikTok is likely even lower than UMG’s.