When licensing negotiations between TikTok and Universal Music Group collapsed in late January, many official recordings by UMG artists disappeared from the platform. UMG Chief Digital Officer/ Executive Vp Michael Nash told financial analysts in February that the company had “delivered alerts to mute millions of videos every day for the past two weeks.” However, some songs associated with UMG — or its publishing arm, Universal Music Publishing Group — remain available on TikTok anyway.
Some are user uploads, which in theory can be harder to find and remove or disable. Others are official tracks, including recent releases from prominent stars and quick viral hits. And many of Taylor SwiftHer catalog was returned to TikTok on Thursday (April 11), raising the question of how other artists can find solutions while the licensing dispute continues.
One possible reason some songs remain on TikTok: Several artist lawyers say so Advertising sign devise contractual imprints to allow their clients to keep their music on the platform. Others note that although they have not yet added these clauses to their recording agreements, it has become a topic of discussion with their clients.
“Some companies allow some of their artists to exclude newly created music from licensing until the company enters into an agreement” with TikTok, he says David Fritz, founding partner at Boyarski Fritz. “Because the issue is so new, we're evolving on the fly to meet the needs of talent — songwriters and artists — who want their music on TikTok. This is an issue and resolution that arose solely as a result of TikTok's removal of UMG's catalog.”
Representatives for UMG and TikTok declined to comment.
Some artists have invested years of their lives building their TikTok following. (Predecessor Musical.ly was acquired by Bytedance in 2017 and then relaunched in the United States as TikTok the following year.) For more than two months now, they haven't been able to share official recordings with those fans on the platform — the same fans who they may have won them their deal with the big company in the first place.
“Some artists worry about that,” he says Josh Binder, founding partner of Rothenberg Mohr & Binder. “They don't want to be uncompetitive, unable to use TikTok to build an audience.”
“TikTok is primarily used as a tool to discover new music — discover a clip on TikTok, listen to it on a DSP,” adds Fritz. “So people trying to discover their music are more concerned” about not being able to push new songs to the app.
In 2022, MIDiA research found that TikTok was the second biggest music discovery driver for Gen Z, after YouTube. In recent months, TikTok's popularity has helped little-known acts such as Dasha, Good Neighbors and Red Clay Strays are exploding on streaming services — leading to major label deals — and contributed to hits for Joe, Flo Milli and Benson Booneincluding.
UMG refuted the idea that TikTok has locked in discovery during its most recent earnings call. President & CEO Lucian Grainge told financial analysts that TikTok “has not been an essential part of the multidisciplinary puzzle where we promote and advertise our music globally.” And UMG CFO/executive representative Boyd Muir said that UMG “will focus on accelerating [its] partnerships' with other social media platforms, including Meta, Snap and YouTube, to provide alternative avenues of promotion for its artists.
But the job of an artist lawyer—at least a good one—is to help his client get what he wants. Labels usually aim to control as many rights as they can for as long as they can. In today's music industry, artists have a greater ability to push back. Because they can build momentum on their own, without the help of a record label, more aspects of a record deal are negotiable. “You can choose what you want to be in your contract to some extent.” Scott Bookerits longtime director The burning lipshe said recently Advertising sign.
As with any negotiation, the artists' ability to get the terms they prefer depends on leverage — especially for stars, there are few hard-and-fast rules — and the skill of the lawyers involved. “If you successfully reserve the right to license TikTok directly in your contract with UMG, you will be able to do so directly or through a third-party service,” he says Leon Morabia, partner at Mark Music & Media Law. “It would be hard to win in a deal, but it's contractually possible.”
Josh Lovepartner at Reed Smith, says he has previously been able to achieve “a stepping stone” that allowed an artist to “license directly with a DSP” — a digital service provider like TikTok or another social or streaming service — “if the label or the distributor is never licensed with this DSP and [the artist] wants to stay on the platform.” This is meant to act as an interim cover for an artist. if the label or distributor enters into a new license agreement, this will likely supersede the agreement made between the artist and the DSP in the interim.
Some clauses already in record deals could also be extended by artists' lawyers to ensure their clients' music remains available on TikTok. “Release commitments”, for example, have been put in place to “force the label to guarantee that a record will be released within a certain number of months after delivery, so that the artist's record is not 'shelved'”, with the artist to be stuck in the deal,” he says Ghadar Savourmusic lawyer.
These clauses are becoming increasingly comprehensive, expanding “to cover the label's commitments to more specific aspects of release — the exact countries in which the album will be distributed, formats in which the album will be released, such as vinyl and digital, even including certain big name DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music.” After the revelations of the negotiations between UMG and TikTok, Savur continues, “it would be a natural response for artists' lawyers to gradually start demanding release commitments to cover all platforms generally, so that if a label is not licensed with a particular platform for any reason, the Artist can deal directly with that platform.”
Savur believes artists who are signed to UMG-distributed labels, rather than signing directly, probably have more room to try to tackle platforms like TikTok on their own. “While I think what Universal is doing is generally good for the industry, Universal-distributed labels may be more sympathetic to their artists' desire to remain on TikTok because increased streaming and ticket sales [that] The result of any tracks going viral on the platform can be a big win for the artist and the label,” says Savur.
If the UMG-TikTok impasse occurs, Fritz says, “smart lawyers” with leverage will find “a solution that allows their clients to continue using the most popular discovery tool while the large-scale license is worked out.”
