The Universal Music Groupknown more commonly as A Ghas announced his intention to withdraw his music from TikTok starting tomorrow.
The label, which represents the likes of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish e Taylor Swiftfailed to reach agreement with ByteDance, owner of the platform. The royalty agreements, in fact, expire today, January 31st.
This is a bad blow for TikTok, given that it will actually lose the possibility of reproducing a vast amount of audio content and, above all regarding TikTok Music, this is a hard blow. The separation, by the way, is apparently not entirely amicable.
In a press release, UMG accused TikTok of trying to build a music-based business without paying artists their fair share.
UMG against TikTok: the collaboration started in 2021 ends
In the label note it is specified as “TikTok has proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of that paid by similarly positioned major social platforms“.
The same document then reports how “Today, demonstrating how little TikTok compensates artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly increasing ad revenue, and growing reliance on music-based content, TikTok only accounts for about 1% of our total revenue“.
TikTok’s response was not long in coming and, a few hours after the publication of the note, a spokesperson wanted to respond to what UMG said.
He accused the label of putting greed before the interests of the artists, declaring that it is a false rhetorical narrative, then underlining how TikTok also represents a promotional vehicle that should not be underestimated.
The agreement between the two parties dates back to 2021 and, since that moment, the social network has grown exponentially.
As part of the deal, UMG and TikTok had agreed to experiment new featuressuch as allowing users to embed clips from UMG’s complete music catalog featuring world-class artists such as Justin Bieber, Adele, U2 ed Elton John.