Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok, Causing Chaos On The Platform
In January, after a lot of back and forth with TikTok, Universal Music Group announced it would not be renewing its license with the platform for its catalog of music that users could use in their videos. UMG's claimed reasoning for this was three-fold: TikTok wasn't doing enough to combat deepfakes of the artists it represents, it wasn't doing enough to combat copyright infringement on its platform generally, and the royalties it pays artists for their music wasn't enough. These complaints are not uncommon from copyright holders to online platforms, of course. We could go into some detail as to why these complaints are, as TikTok's response indicated, self-serving."
But instead, lets focus on how badly TikTok fucked this up on their end as well. That post I linked to at the jump includes the following open questions.
Aside from Universal's massive catalog vanishing from TikTok's library, the pressing question for many users is, what happens to old videos that were fine at the time, but now infringe on copyright?
TikTok didn't respond to questions fromFast Companyasking if Universal Music Group's content suddenly switching to unlicensed could complicate copyright enforcement further. Right now, about 12 million TikTok videos use the hashtag #taylorswift. #Shakeitoff has 170,000, while #1989 has almost 600,000 with 8.5 billion views. Many of these include snippets of Swift's music, or her performing at concerts, or fans singing to the car stereo.
Well, now we know what happens to at least a large portion of those old videos: chaos and silence. The UMG license expired and the catalog has begun to be pulled. The result is that all kinds of TikTok users are reporting that videos previously in good standing are now coming through partially or totally silent.
Sometimes, the app tags infringing videos with a notice reading, Sound removed due to copyright restrictions." Other times, it doesn't, such as witha videoKylie Jenner posted back in September, set to one of Lana Del Rey's songs. Now totally silent, it just carries a caption observing: This sound isn't available." (The copyright-infringement giveaway was old user comments like kylie and lana???" and KYLIE IS A LANA GIRLIE???")
One usercomplainedthat the video of her first dance at her wedding got muted because she and her husband picked an ABBA song. (Luckily, she added, she has a copy saved.) Otherssaidsome of their unpublished drafts have been stripped preemptively of sound, but live posts with the same music weren't touched.
Meanwhile, UMG music still appears on the platform elsewhere, leading to confusion. And making this chaotic situation all the worse was the apparent decision by TikTok not say a whole lot to its users. Those open questions I alluded to at the beginning of the post? Apparently unanswered in advance by TikTok.
TikTok didn't release any public statements in advance to help users prepare, or explain how to salvage content impacted by the Mute-pocalypse. It hasn't posted any guidance to its pages for developers, advertisers, or the media. However, sellers on the app's e-commerce platform, TikTok Shop,apparently receiveda message on Thursday walking through the process to change a video's sound.
It's one thing to play chicken with a major music publisher that is probably playing strongman with its music catalogue for reasons not entirely on the level. But to hang your own users out to dry as a result of that game of chicken is platform malpractice.
I'm fairly certain that TikTok doesn't want to be 2024's Twitch, in other words. All it had to do was communicate.