Universal Music Group threatens to pull song catalogue from TikTok
Universal Music Group (UMG), the label that represents artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande, is planning to pull its music from TikTok at midnight as no agreement on compensation has been reached.
UMG does not plan to renew its current agreement with TikTok, which expires 31 January and is pulling out of TikTok and TikTok Music.
In particular, TikTok and Universal failed to agree on payments for AI-generated recordings using UMG properties. In addition, TikTok did not take appropriate steps to quickly remove content that violated the label’s copyright.
In a statement on its website UMG accused TikTok – which reportedly earned nearly $20 billion in ad revenue last year – of building a music-based business without paying reasonable compensation to artists.
“With respect to the issue of artist and songwriter compensation, TikTok proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay,” the statement read. “Today, as an indication of how little TikTok compensates artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly rising advertising revenue and increasing reliance on music-based content, TikTok accounts for only about 1% of our total revenue.”
UMG went on to criticise the network’s lack of moderation, saying it makes “little effort” to deal with copyright and other issues such as hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment. It also accused the website of damaging the prospects of emerging artists.
“TikTok’s tactics are obvious: use its platform power to hurt vulnerable artists and try to intimidate us into conceding to a bad deal that undervalues music and shortchanges artists and songwriters as well as their fans.”
For UMG and TikTok the clock is indeed running down.
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