With the expiration of their licensing agreement, Universal Music Group, a representative of various artists such as Taylor Swift and others, has announced that it will no longer allow their music on TikTok.
The licensing agreement between UMG and TikTok is expired as of Wednesday.
UMG reported that TokTik aims to establish a business entity around music without offering adequate compensation for the output.
In a letter to artists and musicians on Tuesday, UMG highlighted three issues it has been demanding for: the need to provide fair pay to TikTok’s
employees, safety of artists from the negative impact of artificial intelligence, and ensure the online safety of TikTok users.
TikTok pays its artists and musicians a fee that is much lower than other major social platforms and also mentioned that Tikkok only represents around 1% of the total of their revenue.
UMG also disputed what it described as security issues on TikTok.
UMG is unhappy with TikTok’s efforts to combat what it considers hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment. Removing content that causes concern is an extremely time-consuming and inefficient process, according to them. TikTok was advised by Univeral Music Group to adopt similar measures as some other social media platform partners, but this approach was initially met with indifference and then failure.
According to UMG, TikTok tried to intimidate them into accepting a deal that was significantly below the fair market value of the previous deal during ongoing negotiations.
In what way did he attempt to intimidate us? UMG expressed.
Through the selective removal of music from our emerging artists, while still having a global stardom audience on the platform.
Despite this, TikTok asserted that Universal Music’s primary concern is not the welfare of artists and musicians, as it prioritizes its own greed.
