Taylor Swift is unquestionably the biggest star in the music industry.
Swift’s legions of fanatic “Swifties” helped Tay-Tay’s “Eras Tour” become the first ever billion-dollar concert tour.
Then the pop superstar’s music suddenly disappeared and you won’t believe what happened next.
Universal Music Group protests bad terms in their deal with TikTok
Universal Music Group (UMG) represents some of the biggest artists around.
Huge stars like Drake, Billie Eilish, and of course Taylor Swift call UMG home.
But UMG revealed that on January 31, its licensing agreement with Communist Chinese spy app TikTok expired.
In an open letter, Universal Music Group revealed songs from stars like Swift would disappear unless it could come to an agreement with TikTok on royalties and protection against artificial intelligence.
“The terms of our relationship with TikTok are set by contract, which expires January 31, 2024. In our contract renewal discussions, we have been pressing them on three critical issues—appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users,” the letter read.
Universal Music Group claimed royalties from TikTok amounted to a mere pittance of their artists’ overall income.
“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,” the letter continued.
And the group fretted that TikTok was getting “flooded with AI-generated recordings” and apps that “enable, promote and encourage AI music creation on the platform itself.”
TikTok fires back, calls Swift and other pop stars greedy
TikTok fired back, claiming the artists who didn’t want AI tools creating deep fakes of their music and diluting their work were “greedy.”
“It is sad and disappointing that Universal Music Group has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters,” a statement from TikTok read.
TikTok sought to turn UMG’s huge stable of artists against the superstars by saying that TikTok now serves as the number one platform for record labels to discover new talent.
“Despite Universal’s false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent,” TikTok also claimed.
Despite the rhetoric, a deal reached
Swift’s, and other top stars’, music disappeared from TikTok on February 1 when the licensing agreement expired.
But Swift’s music wasn’t gone from TikTok for long.
Swift’s songs reappeared on the platform on April 11, just one week ahead of the debut of her “Tortured Poets Department” album.
Variety reported that Swift was able to strike her own separate deal because of her unique ownership of her material.
“However, it seems likely that the platform reached a separate deal with Swift, who owns her masters and presumably would have the ability to strike her own arrangement, even though her music is distributed by UMG and she signed with the company’s publishing division in 2020,” Variety reported.
Universal Music Group soon followed suit with its own deal that changed the royalty structure and added new protections to remove AI-generated deep fakes of artists.
Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge announced that “collaborating with the team at TikTok to further the interests of our artists and songwriters and drive innovation in fan engagement while advancing social music monetization.”
As is usually the case in the music industry, big money has won out again.
Political Animal News will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.