There is no bigger star in the music industry than Taylor Swift.
Swift is setting records left and right on tour as well as with her album sales.
But now Taylor Swift made one huge announcement about retiring her music.
Taylor Swift’s music disappeared from the TikTok app when a licensing deal with Universal Music Group – which represents Swift as well as hundreds of other artists – expired.
“The terms of our relationship with TikTok are set by contract, which expires January 31, 2024. In our contract renewal discussions, we have been pressing them on three critical issues—appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users,” a letter from Universal Music Group to TikTok read.
TikTok is the dangerous app the Chinese Communist Party uses to spy on Americans.
But it’s also the number-one platform for record labels to discover new agents.
Instead of sorting through demo tapes, artists and repertoire, scouts scroll through TikTok videos to find the next big thing.
But Universal Music Group wanted a new deal that increased royalty compensation as well as banned the use of artificial intelligence for users to create their own Taylor Swift songs and pass them off as her music.
“Today, as an indication of how little TikTok compensates artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly rising advertising revenue and increasing reliance on music-based content, TikTok accounts for only about 1% of our total revenue,” the letter added.
TikTok refused to budge.
“It is sad and disappointing that Universal Music Group has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters,” TikTok responded in a statement of its own.
“Despite Universal’s false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent,” TikTok’s statement continued.
Swift’s music catalogue vanished from TikTok for weeks.
But there was finally a resolution.
Swift owns the master copies of her own music which puts her in a unique category of artists.
Just before the release of her “Tortured Poets Department” album, Swift struck a new deal with TikTok on her own that allowed her music to return to the platform.
“However, it seems likely that the platform reached a separate deal with Swift, who owns her masters and presumably would have the ability to strike her own arrangement, even though her music is distributed by UMG and she signed with the company’s publishing division in 2020,” an exclusive report in Variety read.
Universal Music Group soon followed suit with a new deal that restricted the use of AI to create deep fakes of artists’ music as well as a new royalty payment system.
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