On February 1st, the Universal Music Group failed to reach their licensing agreements, and for that, TikTok removed all videos using music from their artists. Videos have gone silent due to the removal of one hundred songs. UMG is the Universal Music Group that copyrights a lot of songs from different artists. The company has a global team that works with artists and records with different kinds of music. There are more than a billion users worldwide who use TikTok. Many people use TikTok for the music so they can dance and some people even sing the lyrics while simply recording themselves. Now that TikTok has removed the sounds people have stopped using it as much. Now users say scrolling through TikTok soon looks and sounds like this. The take down has already begun. search for Taylor Swift’s account for example some of her music is muted, and the sound tabs are empty. It’s all because Universal and TikTok haven’t been able to agree on a new licensing agreement to replace the one that expired on Wednesday.
John Yang said in the statement, “ TikTok attempted to bully us into accepting a deal worth less than the previous deal, far less than the previous deal, far less far less than fair market value and not reflective of their growth.”
TikTok responded by stating, “It has been able to reach artist-first agreements with every other label and publisher. Removing Universal licensed music on TikTok will take several days to accomplish. ”
All of this is causing TikTok to lose people using the app and probably going to lose a lot of money because of this. They are attempting to work on an agreement, but they are not agreeing on a contract. UMG has claimed that TikTok promotes the creation of AI music and that TikTok was attempting to build a base business “without paying fair market value”. Evidently, this dispute has become a heated argument that has highlighted the problematic intentions of certain social media platforms.
