Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok, Causing Chaos On The Platform
from the the-silent-treatment dept
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 from Fast Company asking 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 with a video Kylie 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 user complained that 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.) Others said some 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 received a 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.
Filed Under: copyright, licensing, music, videos
Companies: tiktok, umg, universal music, universal music group
Comments on “Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok, Causing Chaos On The Platform”
So because a licensing deal expired, the denizens of TikTok now lose access to and face charges over something that was legal the day they made those videos. So where does the prohibition of ex post facto laws stand in stopping this miscarriage of justice?
Re:
What? Who is facing charges? The videos are just being muted.
Re:
Even if they were facing charges, which they are not, this wouldn’t be an ex post facto violation.
Re: Re:
The possibility of ex post facto laws related to copyright could arise if contracts signed to use someone’s IP took place before the IP was sold to a third party.
Disneys purchase of the rights to Star Wars imperiled the actions of the Fighting 501st squadron for that reason, and the contracts signed between Lucas and the Expanded Universe writers, as well. I wonder if the courts would make the former retroactively guilty, or the latters contracts null and void.
As for TikTok, the loss of music licensing results in awkward scenes of people dancing in stone silence with no background music and no songs coming out of their mouths
The irony of a lot of communication platforms is that they have a tendency to either stay silent or issue completely obtuse or tone-deaf statements often after making terrible decisions that ruin the experience for their users.
Just more enshittification. Republicans shouldn’t worry about banning TikTok. They should encourage it to just act more like Twitter and Reddit so they naturally shed chunks of their user base by being user unfriendly.
TikTok wasn’t, back in around 2016, just a “karaoke” (still very popular in Asia) app?
Would it be fun to just sing and make some beat-boxing to replace the original music?
I guess that this way, a video not publicly published won’t be hit by copyright claims.
This will mostly hurt singers or new pop groups who need to promote h the
Eg tik tok is a major source where new songs become popular as the music to new dances , it’s a great venue to promote music maybe universal thinka they should be paid more as tik tok is a popular app to listen to music
Re:
Singers and new pop groups won’t be affected because they should be singing/playing their own music, unlicensed by UMG in the place.
Re: Re:
Unless they’re covering a song, in which case there could be problems.
Re:
“This will mostly hurt singers or new pop groups”
If someone is newly signed to UMG today, they’ve had plenty of warning as to why that’s a bad thing. That doesn’t mean they deserve it, but the problems with new artists signing over their lives to major labels is older than new musicians.
There’s a simple answer. If a song/video is out of contract with tiktok, allow it to play but charge the user an upfront $4.99 fee to ‘buy’ it.
See how much music gets bought then……
Good for UMG and the musicians tbat they represent. This is the day that Silicon Valley and the US gov must have been waiting for too, indidentally.Really obnoxious attitude by the Chinese to think that the musicians should be content with not getting paid for having their music on Tik Tok and having their music used for crrepy gernative AI, which really needs to be uninvented.
Univent Generatice AI! Or at least boycott it!
One party in a negotiation accusing the other of being ‘self serving’ is both incredibly correct, and wildly irrelevant.
Re:
It’s relevant (at least to PR) when one party is claiming to be motivated by concern for a third party.
I am curious: if Tiktok had a license to for including UMG content in their users videos, how is there any copyright infringement of UMG content on TikTok?
And if they are complaining about copyright infringement that doesn’t effect them (UMG), that seems kind of silly (especially considering that Tiktok got a license at one point for UMG contents, and possibly others), and totally irrelevant to the terms of their licensing.
Re:
That’s because you’re thinking about it like a normal person, not a money-grubbing copyright holder who thinks very little of double-dipping any payment already made.
You’re referring to an industry that releases the same exact movie multiple times, with small changes/additions/etc. in order to gouge their customers as much as possible. In fact, they have a name for it. It’s called, “Getting another bite of the Apple”.
Piracy is here to stay, mostly because of copyright holders and their egregious greed.