More than a third of the songs — at least 17 tracks — on Billboard's TikTok Top 50 chart are no longer available for use on the app after Universal Music Group's negotiations with the platform collapsed last week. UMG said the Bytedance-owned company refuses to pay “fair value for the music”.
The missing tracks include several of the most popular songs on TikTok: Muni Long's “Made for Me” (No. 2 on TikTok Top 50), Xavi's “La Diabla” (No. 7), “Rich Baby Daddy” by Drake (No. 9), and “Let the Light In” by Lana Del Rey (No. 11).
The absence affects both recent releases – “Yes, And?” by Ariana Grande? along with a pair of songs from Nicki Minaj's December album — and the catalog: Lesley Gore's “Misty,” originally released in 1963, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor's “Murder on the Dancefloor,” released in 2002 but entered the Hot 100 for the first time recently due to timing in the film Saltburn.
It looks like users can still make videos of an official “orchestral version” of “Murder on the Dancefloor” — likely because it's licensed to a different company. And although UMG and TikTok's licensing deal has expired, 10k.Caash's “Aloha,” which was released on UMG's Def Jam label in 2019, has been available for TikTok video soundtracks since Thursday morning.
Additionally, TikTok has long had a vibrant bootleg scene, meaning that in some cases, users have uploaded their own versions of UMG songs or remixed them in place of the official tracks. Those bootlegs have also been a source of frustration for the record label, which said last week that “TikTok is making little effort to address the massive amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists' music.” It's worth noting, however, that record companies often encourage remixers to rework their artists' songs without proper clearances in hopes of starting a viral trend.
TikTok has been a dominant force in the music industry since 2019, transforming both marketing and signing strategies. “We fully immerse ourselves in the various subcultures of TikTok,” he said Alec Henderson, vp digital at independent label APG, in December. “We have weekly meetings dedicated to sharing things we see there. We look at the TikTok viral map with a competitive mindset. And we're putting a lot of emphasis on working with artists that are native to the platform.”
As the industry became increasingly focused on TikTok, it also became increasingly concerned about the power of the platform. The app became increasingly saturated — brands, movies, video games, cats, ASMR, you name it — which made music marketing more expensive and less effective. Labels are used to having some level of influence over promotional levers. TikTok has proven frustratingly difficult to exploit.
Tension over the platform's low payouts also began to rise. TikTok parent ByteDance 'doesn't see music as a value add', says senior executive Advertising sign in the fall of 2022. “They see music as a cost center that they need to cut as much as possible.”
“THE [payout] The numbers are scary,” one manager said at the time. A marketer who oversaw the campaign for a single that was used in nearly half a million TikTok videos, garnering billions of views, found that his artist got less than $5,000 from the platform. It was no surprise when the CEO of UMG Lucian Grainge fired a warning shot in late 2022, pointedly noting at an industry conference that a value gap is “creating rapidly in new iterations of short-form video.”
Last week, Universal Music Group said its licensing deal with TikTok was set to expire on January 31. “TikTok has proposed to pay our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of what major social media platforms pay in a similar location,” UMG said in an open letter. The record label accused TikTok of trying to “intimidate us into accepting a bad deal that devalues music and degrades artists and songwriters and their fans.”
After UMG issued its statement, TikTok hit back, accusing the record label of pushing a “false narrative.” It's “sad and disappointing,” TikTok added, “that [UMG] they have put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.” These comments prompted another response from UMG.
If the standoff between the two companies continues, it will begin to affect even more music: At the end of the month, TikTok will have to remove any song involving Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG). Many UMPG songwriters work with artists signed to other labels (or have been signed as artists to other labels). This means that the number of songs that become useless on TikTok may increase.
Of course, artists can sell their music elsewhere — TikTok has competitors in both YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. However, none of these apps have proven the ability to break a song with the speed and intensity of TikTok.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/business/streaming/tiktok-most-popular-songs-gone-after-umg-clash-1235599919/
