Fans of Taylor Swift, Drake, Bad Bunny and many other world-renowned artists woke up on Thursday to some disappointing news from Universal Music Group: they will no longer be able to lip-sync or dance to their favorite artists on TikTok.
UMG’s contract with TikTok expired Wednesday, and this morning the company publicly announced that it has no intention of renewing the licensing agreement that allowed the songs on the popular social media platform. As of Thursday, none of the videos featuring music by UMG artists were removed from the app, but the audio is no longer available. Going forward, there will no longer be music by UMG artists officially available on the app.
This not only affects artists signed directly under UMG but also UMG subsidiaries, including Republic Records, Interscope Records and Capitol Music Group, which include artists like Nicki Minaj, Olivia Rodrigo and Troye Sivan — all of whom have utilized the platform ahead of their recent album releases. Despite many artists using TikTok to promote their music, UMG said it has the artists’ best interest in mind.
In the renewal discussions, UMG was prioritizing artists and songwriter compensation, protecting artists from AI, and TikTok user safety.
“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,” the company said in a statement.
TikTok did not take kindly to the criticism and issued its own statement, accusing UMG of putting “greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”
“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,” the statement continued. “TikTok has been able to reach ‘artist-first’ agreements with every other label and publisher. Clearly, Universal’s self-serving actions are not in the best interests of artists, songwriters and fans.”
The main issue UMG wanted was more restrictions on AI usage, including AI-generated songs and sounds using its artists’ voices. As TikTok filled with AI content, UMG saw this as artists being replaced by AI while the app still benefited from the likeness of the real artists, as well as TikTok doing nothing to stop it.
Entertainment lawyer Jane Davidson explained that UMG was attempting to get more out of TikTok since without its music and content, TikTok can’t operate, which she said has become common among tech and entertainment companies.
“UMG is really trying to highlight the fact of how valuable the music is to the platform and trying to get more royalties,” Davidson said. “They don’t want to be in a position where they’ve not taken advantage of a potential revenue source.”
While some fans have expressed their disappointment at UMG’s actions, others said they are staying positive, choosing to see this as an opportunity for new, independent artists. With major artists no longer allowed on the platform, some believe that new, smaller artists will begin popping up on TikTok.
“It’s very interesting to see how much TikTok has helped artists,” Dylan Miller, a user with 500k followers, said. “TikTok helped elevate Tate McRae’s ‘Exes’ and ‘Greedy’ to her first number one song.”
But without the long list of hit songs and artists to choose from, TikTok creators will have to take their content in a new direction, opening the door to more opportunities for new artists and content creators to think outside trending audio.
“People, especially on TikTok, get very creative and out of the box, especially with songs in general,” Miller said. “So I think people will get really creative with what they can do.”