In a seismic shift that’s sent shockwaves through the music world, Taylor Swift’s chart-topping tracks are finally making their triumphant return to TikTok. This comes after a protracted patent punchup between the video-sharing juggernaut and Universal Music Group, Swift’s longtime label home, over a slew of simmering issues.
The hard-fought deal, unveiled in a blaze of publicity on Thursday, marks the end of an acrimonious eight-month hiatus. It all kicked off in January when the previous licensing pact expired without renewal, prompting Universal to abruptly yank its marquee artists – from Swift’s sugary pop confections to Ariana Grande’s gossamer R&B reprises – off the platform in a drastic act of brinkmanship.
At the crux of the high-stakes imbroglio were raft of prickly sticking points, including royalty payouts, the policing of AI-generated tracks across TikTok, and online safety guardrails. While the precise fiscal terms remain a closely-guarded secret, the new pact signals a multipronged offensive to mint money from TikTok’s ballooning e-commerce fiefdom.
In a terse joint statement larded with corporatespeak, the erstwhile foes pledged to “work together on campaigns supporting UMG’s artists across genres and territories globally.” An opaque overture, to be sure, but one that hints at broader cross-promotional synergies and revenue streams.
For the Beijing-based upstart, having marquee acts like Swift, Adele and Drake back in its stable is nothing short of a coup. TikTok’s staggering 1.5 billion global userbase – over 170 million of whom reside in the US – increasingly turns to the app as a musical trailhead. Per data from Midia Research, “Roughly a quarter of US consumers say they listen to songs they have heard on TikTok” first, elbowing aside even Spotify and YouTube.
But that ubiquity has been a double-edged sword. Universal groused that despite its outsize cultural imprint, TikTok remits a paltry 1% of its annual revenue back to the label – a mere $110 million last year, dwarfed by YouTube’s $1.8 billion royalty payout.
Simmering beneath the commercial quibbling was a more existential quandary: the ethics of AI’s encroachment into music-making. Universal has carped that TikTok is awash in quasi-legal AI-spun “songs” and kaleidoscopic mashups generated by the platform’s own songwriting tools.
The new pact appears to stake out some middle ground, with TikTok vowing to “remove unauthorized AI-generated music” while collaborating on “tools to improve artist and songwriter attribution.” Hardly a tidy resolution, but one that could forestall a technopocalyptic scenario where AI annexes songcraft altogether.
For her part, Swift briefly threaded the AI/TikTok needle amid the impasse by permitting some of her older hits to unofficially grace the app while promoting her latest blockbuster LP, “The Tortured Poets Department.” A canny hedge that may have augured her label’s negotiating leverage, as the pop titan owns the master rights to her Republic-era catalog.
As the music industry grapples with disruptive streaming models that paradoxically boost exposure while attenuating revenue, TikTok’s resurgent symbiosis with the major labels will be a delicate danse to choreograph. But for now, the dulcet strains of “Anti-Hero” and kindred Swift standards have been unshackled, bringing much-needed succor to the hordes of vocal #Swifties demanding their fix.
