More than one-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 fell apart last week. UMG said the Bytedance-owned company refuses to pay “fair value for the music.”
Impact on Popular Tracks and User Experience:
The missing tracks include several of the most popular songs on TikTok: Muni Long’s “Made for Me” (No. 2 on the TikTok Top 50), Xavi’s “La Diabla” (No. 7), Drake’s “Rich Baby Daddy” (No. 9), and Lana Del Rey’s “Let the Light In” (No. 11).
The absence impacts both recent releases — Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” along with a pair of songs from Nicki Minaj’s December album — and catalog: Lesley Gore’s “Misty,” originally released way back in 1963 and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor,” which came out in 2002 but charted on the Hot 100 for the first time recently due to a synch in the film Saltburn.
Complications and Exceptions:
Users still appear to be able to make videos with an official “orchestral version” of “Murder on the Dancefloor” — likely because it’s licensed to a different label. And even though UMG and TikTok’s licensing agreement expired at 10k.Caash’s “Aloha,” released by the UMG label Def Jam in 2019, is available to soundtrack TikTok videos as of Thursday morning.
Response to Bootleg Scene and Unauthorized Content:
In addition, TikTok has long had a vibrant bootleg scene, which means that in some cases, users have uploaded their versions of UMG songs or made remixes in place of the official sounds.
Those bootlegs were also a source of frustration for the record company, which said last week, “TikTok makes little effort to deal with the vast amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists’ music.”
Industry Dynamics and Concerns:
As the industry became increasingly focused on TikTok, it became increasingly uneasy about its power. The app started to get saturated — with brands, movies, video games, cats, ASMR, and more battling for attention — making marketing music more expensive and less effective. Labels are used to having some influence over promotional levers; TikTok proved frustratingly hard to leverage.
Financial Disputes and Value Assessment:
Tension over the platform’s low payouts started to grow as well. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, “doesn’t view music as a value add,” one senior executive told Billboard in the fall of 2022. “They just view music as a cost center. They have to limit as much as possible.”
If the standoff between the two companies continues, it will affect even more music: At the end of the month, TikTok will have to take down any song that Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) has a stake in.
Many UMPG songwriters collaborate with artists signed to other labels (or are signed as artists on other labels). This means the number of songs that become unusable on TikTok could balloon.
