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Instagram announced a new feature on Thursday (Oct. 18) that makes it easier for users to save songs they discover while perusing the app.
The social app aims to make the music-saving process as frictionless as possible — and users don’t have to leave Instagram to do it. If they find a song they like, they can simply click on the track to reach its audio page and then tap the “add” button. Saved tracks show up in their “Liked Songs” playlist on Spotify. Currently, no other streaming services are integrated with Instagram.
The Spotify-Instagram integration comes roughly a year after TikTok launched its “Add to Music App,” a very similar feature that allows users to save music they find on the platform. TikTok had more partners for its feature — not just Spotify initially, but also Amazon Music and Apple Music.
“TikTok is already the world’s most powerful platform for music discovery and promotion, which helps artists connect with our global community to drive engagement with their music,” Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music business development, said in a statement last year. The new feature “takes this process a step further, creating a direct link between discovery on TikTok and consumption on a music streaming service, making it easier than ever for music fans to enjoy the full length song on the music streaming service of their choice, thereby generating even greater value for artists and rights holders.”
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The “Add to Music App” has become even more of a priority for TikTok recently. In September, the company announced that it was shutting down its subscription streaming service, TikTok Music, to focus more on integrating with existing streamers. “Our Add to Music App feature has already enabled hundreds of millions of track saves to playlists on partner music streaming services,” Obermann said.
On Wednesday (Oct. 16), TikTok announced that another streaming service would join the “Add to Music App”: Melon, which is popular in South Korea.
“Since the launch of Add to Music App, we have seen the TikTok community fully embrace the opportunity to save the songs they discover to the music streaming service of their choice,” Michael Kümmerle, global head of music partnership development, said in a statement. “Our new partnership with Melon means that millions more music fans in Korea will be able to save, share and listen again to music they fell in love with on TikTok.”
In July, popular influencer/podcast host Tinx took to TikTok to ask her followers a question: “Are labels and artists asking random people to make content about music and not say[ing] it’s an ad?” The answer in the over 700 replies to the video was a resounding and simple “yes.”
“Sound campaigns” have been an integral part of music marketing since TikTok took off in 2019, but they differ from other paid promotion campaigns on social media. Captioning a video with #ad, or another similar disclosure, is required by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) when companies “pay you or give you free or discounted products or services” in exchange for featuring their product in a video, but that has never been the standard for the paid promotion of a song. “Any essence of perceived authenticity can be stripped away when a creator tags a video as paid,” says one digital marketing agency CEO.
As a result, one major label marketer believes “75% of popular songs on TikTok started with a creator marketing campaign,” but says that there’s no way to actually track how many of the songs that go viral on TikTok do so organically or are boosted by thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars’ worth of paid promo.
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When asked for clarification about whether or not promoting songs in the background of videos requires disclosure, a representative for the FTC said, “While we can’t comment on any particular example, that practice seems somewhat analogous to a product placement… When there are songs playing in the backgrounds of videos, there are no objective claims made about the songs. The video creator may be communicating implicitly that they like the song, but viewers can judge the song themselves when they listen to it playing in the video. For these reasons, it may not be necessary for a video to disclose that the content creator was compensated for using a particular song in the background in the video. We would evaluate each case individually however.”
While it is not, in most cases, an FTC violation to run undisclosed creator campaigns to promote singles on TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, it remains a little-understood area of music marketing that many music fans are not aware is happening. “The beauty of Tiktok, for me, has disappeared because I’m super cynical and believe everything I see there, disclosed or not, is paid to be promoted,” says the digital marketing agency CEO. (Most of the sources in this story requested anonymity in order to speak freely about how these campaigns work.)
Often, digital marketing gurus will reminisce about the days of the Hype House bros and the D’Amelio’s TikTok reign, around the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which were considered the good ol’ days for creator marketing. At the time, it was expected for successful TikTok virality to translate into boosts in streams practically every time. “Back then, it made sense to pay over $10,000 a video for those famous kids to post your song. There was a high probability of [return on investment] ROI in 2020,” says a second digital marketing agency CEO. One creator manager says they remember a top creator at the time boasting about getting “$50,000 to just play the sound” in the background of a TikTok.
Typically, these creators would be instructed by an artist manager, a label, or a third-party digital marketing company (most times the latter) to perform a certain trend along with the song, like a dance or a certain filter, in exchange for money.
But these days, experts like George Karalexis, CEO of YouTube marketing and rights management company Ten2 Media, say it’s “more expensive and harder than ever to start a trend” online. As Billboard reported in 2022, TikTok tracks in the U.S. were streamed far less that year than they were in 2021, according to the most recent available data from Luminate.
Now, this unpredictability has led to top creators rarely fetching rates of over $10,000 for the use of a song in a video. Instead, digital marketers are spreading their budgets over many videos from smaller creators to make the illusion of a less-detectable groundswell of support. The second digital marketing agency CEO says today’s payment ranges from $25 for a micro creator (at or below about 10,000 followers) to $10,000 for a TikTok star to post the song.
Recently, a cottage industry of startups has popped up in the creator campaign space, automating the connection between smaller creators and artists looking to pay them to promote their songs. One of the leading companies, Sound.Me, for example, recently ran a creator campaign for “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” through their service. TikTok is also offering up a similar service with its “Work With Artists” feature inside the app, which allows qualifying creators (those with over 50,000 followers and living within a certain territory) to get paid to use songs, like Halsey’s cover of “Lucky,” in their videos.
Even when an artist is willing to spend a significant budget on one particular creator, that doesn’t mean the creator will always accept. Sound promos are known to be less lucrative for creators than other brand deals, like fashion or skincare, and thus it’s common for top creators to “shoot [the artist’s team] an outrageous number, knowing a sound campaign is not necessarily worth their time otherwise,” says the creator manager.
It is also far less common to ask for a specific type of video from a creator today. Instead, the second digital marketing CEO says “it’s not really about pushing specific creative. It’s just about finding the right creators for the artist’s target audience and kind of just letting the influencers run with creative freedom.”
All of this makes discerning the paid promotion of a song from organic enthusiasm more challenging than ever. Even more complicated, the creator manager says that it’s “best practice” for creators “who want to work with a specific brand to show for free that they are using the brand’s products anyway to attract their attention. Same goes for songs.”
The sign of true success for these campaigns is when social media use of the song grows far beyond the initial budget, encouraging unpaid creators to jump in and use the track, too, multiple digital marketing sources say. “The value is in the people [using the song] that aren’t being paid,” says Jeremy Gruber, head of artist marketing and digital strategy at management company Friends at Work. “Success is when we have 13 types of videos going on at once to the song,” adds one indie label marketer. “We can’t even tell what’s happening.”
Typically, these sound campaigns are conducted in phases, and while they are common, they are not expected for every single release, three label marketing sources say. $5,000 is the low-end for what two digital marketing agencies believe would be a fruitful campaign, but the spending can grow to $80,000 (or even into the six figures for rare cases) if it is a big-name artist and the song is reacting positively. Typically after the first round of the campaign, the team will watch and see if the song grows. If it does, then a next wave of spending will be opened up and seeded out to creators to stoke the flame.
Gruber believes an ethical gray area arises when artists’ teams offer money to music curation influencers to explicitly recommend a song without disclosing the transaction to viewers. Unlike a “product placement”-like promotion which simply streams in the background, these music curators use TikTok to talk to the camera, telling consumers to take action and check out new songs in exchange for undisclosed money, concert tickets or other perks. When asked about this type of promotion specifically, the FTC declined to comment on whether or not disclosure is needed.
It’s also common for record labels to turn to social media-based blogs, typically in the rap genre, like WorldStarHipHop, Rap, Our Generation Music and more which offer pay-to-play promotion on TikTok and other social platforms to create the appearance of organic online chatter. In one message exchange, reviewed by Billboard, a representative from Rap told a music company that “solo” posts go for $1,000, but they offer discounted rates for ordering in “bulk.” Typically, these payments are not disclosed to consumers.
While it might come as a surprise to some music lovers to learn how often these paid campaigns are used, the general consensus among the eight sources spoken to for this story is that it isn’t harming anyone to do it —at least not in the types of campaigns that resemble product placements. “Music, to me, is this beautiful art form and it is completely different from other ‘products’ in other industries [that run creator campaigns],” says the first digital marketing agency CEO. “We do feel that ethically we’re promoting content that is a net positive to society.”
It may not be as effective as it was a few years ago, but creator campaigns are largely believed to still be essential to market songs today, whether it’s on TikTok or on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts (which is increasingly common). Says the second digital marketing agency founder: “It’s still the best thing we have.”
This story was published as part of Billboard’s new music technology newsletter ‘Machine Learnings.’ Sign up for ‘Machine Learnings,’ and Billboard’s other newsletters, here.
From serenading celebrities with surprise cover songs to releasing his own original music, Harry Daniels delivered his debut single “I’m Him” first thing Thursday (Oct. 17). The electro-pop song, which made its radio debut on New York’s Z100 first thing Thursday, was inspired by Daniels’ rise to fame as a viral star on TikTok, where […]
TikTok’s decision to boycott Merlin and pursue direct deals with Merlin’s member labels is a troubling move that undermines the rights of labels to choose how their music is licensed. While TikTok frames this shift as a way to tackle streaming fraud, it’s clear that the real motive is to weaken the bargaining power of independent labels and use that leverage to suppress rates.
Merlin has built strong partnerships over the last 16 years with more than 40 digital services worldwide. These partners recognize the value Merlin brings—efficiency, scale, and a deep understanding of the independent music community. TikTok’s move to sideline Merlin is not about protecting against fraud but about undermining the ability of independent labels to achieve competitive terms, not just now but for the long term. The ultimate consequence of its refusal to negotiate with Merlin for the music that earns TikTok billions of dollars, will be to damage artists’ ability to make a living from their art.
This tactic is not new. It echoes the historical struggles of the music industry with partners such as terrestrial radio and MTV, both of which profited massively from the use of recorded music while refusing to pay artists under the pretext of “promotional value” or “exposure” — ostensibly for the sale of an artist’s CDs or LPs. In this largely digital economy the stream is the sale – and it has been widely reported that TikTok pays rights holders far less than other services for equivalent uses of music.
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Richard James Burgess, President and CEO of A2IM
Independent labels choose Merlin to license their rights, because of its expertise, experience and track record in striking these kinds of deals. This ensures compensation at levels enabling them to compete with the majors and protects independents from being unfairly exploited. TikTok’s decision to bypass Merlin and demand direct deals is an assault on the freedom of small and medium sized enterprises to determine their own business strategies. The fact that TikTok is giving Merlin members a matter of days to accept TikTok’s terms or lose access to its massive platform, is an unfair exercise of its market power.
This apparent divide-and-conquer strategy is, we believe, designed to keep payouts for indie artists low by exploiting their perceived reliance on TikTok’s platform. It’s not about addressing fraud or improving the digital music ecosystem. In fact, by exponentially multiplying the number of license deals TikTok will need to strike and by losing Merlin as a partner in the fight against fraudulent material, more fraud is likely to ensue. Merlin simplifies licensing, making it easier for platforms to access diverse, independent music. Fragmenting this system hurts artists and fans and will limit the range of music available on TikTok.
At its core, this issue is about respecting the rights of independent labels to determine how their music is licensed. TikTok’s behavior doesn’t reflect a problem with Merlin; it reflects TikTok’s lack of respect for the value of music. Every other major platform has struck responsible deals with Merlin that balance the needs of the service with optimized compensation for artists. TikTok’s refusal to do so sets a dangerous precedent for recording artists and their labels.
TikTok must stop undermining and disrespecting the independent music community. It can do this by working with the labels’ rights management agency of choice to establish a fair, transparent licensing system that benefits all stakeholders in the music ecosystem. Independent labels have the right to choose their representatives to negotiate deals that truly reflect the value of their artists’ creative contributions. Anything less is a disservice to the artists and the fans and undermines the very fabric of music culture.
Dr. Richard James Burgess is an acclaimed musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, composer, author, manager, marketer and inventor, who presently serves as the president and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).
Spotify subscribers in 97 countries will no longer have to leave the app to watch their favorite artists’ music videos, the company announced on Tuesday (Oct. 15). The beta test, which started earlier this year in around a dozen countries — including the U.K., Germany, Brazil and Colombia — will also expand to South Korea […]
More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits against TikTok on Tuesday, alleging the popular short-form video app is harming youth mental health by designing its platform to be addictive to kids.
The lawsuits stem from a national investigation into TikTok, which was launched in March 2022 by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from many states, including California, Kentucky and New Jersey. All of the complaints were filed in state courts.
At the heart of each lawsuit is the TikTok algorithm, which powers what users see on the platform by populating the app’s main “For You” feed with content tailored to people’s interests. The lawsuits also emphasize design features that they say make children addicted to the platform, such as the ability to scroll endlessly through content, push notifications that come with built-in “buzzes” and face filters that create unattainable appearances for users.
In its filings, the District of Columbia called the algorithm “dopamine-inducing,” and said it was created to be intentionally addictive so the company could trap many young users into excessive use and keep them on its app for hours on end. TikTok does this despite knowing that these behaviors will lead to “profound psychological and physiological harms,” such as anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia and other long-lasting problems, the complaint said.
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“It is profiting off the fact that it’s addicting young people to its platform,” District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in an interview.
Keeping people on the platform is “how they generate massive ad revenue,” Schwalb said. “But unfortunately, that’s also how they generate adverse mental health impacts on the users.”
TikTok does not allow children under 13 to sign up for its main service and restricts some content for everyone under 18. But Washington and several other states said in their filing that children can easily bypass those restrictions, allowing them to access the service adults use despite the company’s claims that its platform is safe for children.
Their lawsuit also takes aim at other parts of the company’s business.
The district alleges TikTok is operating as an “unlicensed virtual economy” by allowing people to purchase TikTok Coins – a virtual currency within the platform – and send “Gifts” to streamers on TikTok LIVE who can cash it out for real money. TikTok takes a 50% commission on these financial transactions but hasn’t registered as a money transmitter with the U.S. Treasury Department or authorities in the district, according to the complaint.
Officials say teens are frequently exploited for sexually explicit content through TikTok’s LIVE streaming feature, which has allowed the app to operate essentially as a “virtual strip club” without any age restrictions. They say the cut the company gets from the financial transactions allows it to profit from exploitation.
Many states have filed lawsuits against TikTok and other tech companies over the past few years as a reckoning grows against prominent social media platforms and their ever-growing impact on young people’s lives. In some cases, the challenges have been coordinated in a way that resembles how states previously organized against the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries.
Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued TikTok, alleging the company was sharing and selling minors’ personal information in violation of a new state law that prohibits these practices. TikTok, which disputes the allegations, is also fighting against a similar data-oriented federal lawsuit filed in August by the Department of Justice.
Several Republican-led states, such as Nebraska, Kansas, New Hampshire, Kansas, Iowa and Arkansas, have also previously sued the company, some unsuccessfully, over allegations it is harming children’s mental health, exposing them to “inappropriate” content or allowing young people to be sexually exploited on its platform. Arkansas has brought a legal challenge against YouTube, as well as Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram and is being sued by dozens of states over allegations its harming young people’s mental health. New York City and some public school districts have also brought their own lawsuits.
TikTok, in particular, is facing other challenges at the national level. Under a federal law that took effect earlier this year, TikTok could be banned from the U.S. by mid-January if its China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell the platform by mid-January.
Both TikTok and ByteDance are challenging the law at an appeals court in Washington. A panel of three judges heard oral arguments in the case last month and are expected to issue a ruling, which could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Over the last decade or two, there have been dozens of difficult licensing negotiations between rightsholders and online music platforms — some of which played out in public or even resulted in content being unavailable online.
Just this week, around the time YouTube temporarily took down music by SESAC songwriters, the digital rights licensing collective Merlin informed its member labels that TikTok “walked away” from talks to renew its license agreement and planned to deal with labels individually. This letter Merlin sent to its members says TikTok’s goal is “fragmenting the Merlin membership, in order, we believe, to minimize their pay out.”
In one way, this is an old story. Most online platforms have so much market share that it’s hard for rightsholders to negotiate good deals: There’s just one TikTok, just like there’s just one Facebook and just one YouTube. But there are thousands of labels. Since smaller labels need giant platforms more than those platforms need labels, they need to bulk up, in order to balance market share against market share. For indie labels, that means either making a distribution deal with a major or joining Merlin, which negotiates on behalf of its members. (This same idea has fueled a merger mania throughout the media business, as movie studios and book publishers merge to better deal with Netflix or Amazon.) Sometimes, though, platforms push back.
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In another way, this is an old story with a new twist. TikTok has suggested that part of the reason it wants to change its deal structure is that it’s concerned about fraud, specifically the alleged delivery of recordings and remixes by labels that do not own the rights to them or assert ownership incorrectly — a problem that sources say comes disproportionately from a few companies. This seems like a reasonable concern, and it’s one that’s widely shared, although the problem is hardly unique to Merlin. Plus, it should be possible to exclude a small number of bad actors from a new Merlin deal, and it’s hard to imagine that dealing with indies directly wouldn’t give TikTok a financial advantage.
In yet another way, this is a whole new kind of negotiation, the likes of which the music business hasn’t seen since the early days of YouTube. These days, most online platforms need to play nice, or at least sort of nice, since negotiations that turn ugly in public tend to be distracting from other public policy priorities, and because today’s negotiating counterparty could become tomorrow’s business partner.
TikTok seems less concerned with these issues: It went without a Universal Music deal for about three months early this year and then didn’t renew its NMPA-blessed deal with independent publishers. Partly, that could be because it’s already facing an existential policy issue in the form of a ban in the U.S., or at least a forced sale to prevent that. It also seems to think that music doesn’t drive as much value — which could be why it’s shutting down its nascent TikTok Music subscription service. Whether or not the company is right, its attitude toward rightsholders can be very different.
TikTok is also developing a reputation, fairly or not, for being less sentimental about the culture business than other platforms. For years, most online platforms have made the case that rightsholders are better off with the deals they’re offering, because of the exposure they offer — think YouTube or Spotify. TikTok clearly has significant promotional value, but it tends to act more aggressively. Or maybe its other reputational issues are so significant that pissing off music rightsholders just isn’t as big a deal.
That could change — TikTok’s Merlin strategy has indie labels rattled because it could splinter the rights group. If the platform’s gambit works, other companies could follow and Merlin could end up in a weaker position. The bigger indies would be fine. Others might look for leverage from the major labels’ indie distribution companies, like The Orchard (Sony Music) and Virgin (UMG), which would further undermine Merlin. This would damage the whole indie ecosystem — especially the small labels run by creative founders who don’t have the infrastructure to negotiate as smartly as Merlin.
There’s also a chance that this won’t be as easy as TikTok thinks. Going around Merlin could save it money, but if it’s so simple you wonder why no other platform has tried it. One reason is that Merlin deals cover a wide range of labels and content, some of which could be hard to get otherwise. Another is that it’s easier to do one negotiation than hundreds. Assuming, of course, that TikTok is serious about negotiating, as opposed to simply sending a letter with deal terms that it expects rigthsholders to accept.
Independent music trade bodies have hit out at TikTok for boycotting collective license talks with Merlin by seeking to strike direct deals with its indie label members, accusing the platform of trying to divide the sector and “drive down the value” of music.
Licensing talks between TikTok and Merlin, which negotiates digital licenses for a coalition of more than 30,000 independent labels and music companies, representing 15% of the global recorded music market, abruptly ended late last month when “TikTok walked away before negotiations even began,” according to a letter Merlin sent to its members on Friday (Sept. 27).
The London-headquartered indie rights organization, which counts the labels 4AD, Domino, Matador, Subpop, Partisan, Warp, XL Recordings and Secretly Group among its members, said that TikTok told them that it would not be renewing its license deal, due to expire Oct. 31, and was instead looking to licence its members directly.
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A spokesperson for TikTok confirmed Monday (Oct. 1) that it was “committed to entering into direct deals with Merlin members in order to keep their music on TikTok.”
One of the reasons TikTok has given for not renegotiating its deal with Merlin is its concerns over alleged streaming fraud, which a TikTok spokesperson told Billboard specifically relates to a handful of Merlin members delivering songs or remixes of songs that they don’t own the rights to.
Addressing those allegations, Merlin told members it has worked “productively and collaboratively with TikTok” on streaming manipulation and fraudulent content “and until now, no concerns have been raised.”
Executives and trade bodies from across the independent music sector have also called into question TikTok’s reasoning for not renewing its deal with Merlin, while also slamming its attempts to boycott collective licensing with the company.
Brussels-based independent labels trade body IMPALA, which represents over 6,000 indie music companies in Europe and has previously criticized TikTok for the low returns it pays to rightsholders, said it strongly opposed TikTok’s attempts to boycott Merlin.
“Given the timing, it seems clear that TikTok’s real intention is to fragment the sector and drive down the value of independent music, rather than deal with streaming manipulation,” said Mark Kitcatt, chair of IMPALA’s streaming group, in a statement on Thursday (Oct. 3).
“Record labels have entrusted their rights to Merlin to negotiate on their behalf and by TikTok going directly to rights holders they are disrespecting the licensing agreements that are in place,” added Dan Waite, chair of IMPALA’s digital committee. “Like a supermarket chain negotiating directly with individual farmers for the price of their milk, it’s difficult to see how this can work out in the farmers’ favour.”
Referencing TikTok’s cited concerns around streaming manipulation, IMPALA’s executive chair Helen Smith questioned how seeking direct deals with Merlin members would better address the issue than renewing a collective license. “This feels like a smoke screen for boycotting Merlin given the history and the timing and the fact the whole industry is working hard on this important issue,” said Smith in a statement.
“TikTok’s claim that leaving Merlin would alleviate fraud is technically and effectively incorrect,” Gee Davy, interim CEO of the U.K.-based Association of Independent Music (AIM), tells Billboard. She claims that TikTok can already choose which music catalogs it uploads through the Merlin deal, and stresses it is by the industry working together “and TikTok re-engaging with Merlin that the industry will fight online fraud.”
“The resource required to close deals and manage a large number of independent music relationships, take down unlicensed music, and handle fraud separately across a number of participants would surely outweigh any gains,” says Davy. “And that’s aside from any reputational issues that arise from TikTok claiming to respect independent music while in practice showing that they don’t respect the licensing choices of independent music businesses.
“Many smaller labels and artists will be locked out of any direct licensing, which will sour relations as well as set back many years of work by Merlin, AIM and others in improving equitable access to the market and diversity of music available to consumers. We urge TikTok to speak to us and consider the bigger picture and; most of all, to recognise the inadvertent damage their actions have caused and return to discussions with Merlin.”
Those sentiments were echoed by Dr. Richard Burgess, president of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), who earlier this week told Billboard: “TikTok’s refusal to negotiate a deal with Merlin isn’t just a setback — it’s a threat to the whole music ecosystem.” Burgess said the dispute “isn’t just about Merlin; it’s about properly recognizing the value of artists and their music.”
The Brussels-based International Music Publishers Forum (IMPF) has also urged TikTok to reengage and strike a licensing agreement with Merlin, calling its attempts to “circumnavigate” collective licensing “a thinly veiled attempt to divide independent labels and drive down the price of music.”
“Merlin’s members have entrusted their rights to the organisation in order to uphold transparency, efficiency and fair remuneration. That must be respected,” said IMPF in a statement.
Merlin is the third music organization this year, after Universal Music Group (UMG) and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), to express challenges in renewing music licenses with TikTok. In February, UMG’s failure to reach a deal with TikTok led to the removal of its entire catalog of hits from TikTok for about three months.
In April, after publicly supporting UMG’s position against TikTok, the NMPA allowed its TikTok license, which was used by a number of indie publishers, to lapse as well. It has not been renewed. A spokesperson for TikTok says that many of the indie publishers have now established their own direct licenses with the short-form app.
Unless a swift resolution can be found between TikTok and Merlin — or Merlin’s label members choose to negotiate individual license deals with the ByteDance-owned platform — hit songs from artists like Nirvana, Phoebe Bridgers, Diplo, The Lumineers, Mac Demarco, Madlib, Mitski, Thundercat, Wet Leg and Coolio could start to be removed from TikTok on Nov. 1.
Last year, TikTok attempted to answer a seemingly simple question: What would TikTok be without music?
In February 2023, the company ran tests in Australia limiting the amount of licensed music some users encountered on the app. TikTok never revealed the results of those tests to the public, but some Australians who had their music libraries limited took to Twitter (now X) to complain. “wtf is up with tiktok removing like half the sounds??? like i swear ive seen SO many tiktoks where the sound has been removed,” tweeted one user.
The evidence is only anecdotal, but these tweets suggest that having limited access to licensed music did have at least some impact on the user experience in Australia.
Since its inception, the value of music has been an existential question for TikTok. This comes as no surprise; the company started out as the lipsyncing app Musical.ly, and in its current form, it is one of the most effective music discovery tools in the world. But since the modern-day TikTok launched as a general social media app — one that still features lots of music — the company has struggled to figure out how big a role music should play in their business — and how much they should have to pay for it.
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In the last year or so, TikTok has fought a prolonged battle against Universal Music Group over music licensing rates, AI, and safety concerns, leading to UMG’s three-month boycott of the platform; downsized parts of its music team; shut down the development of TikTok Music, its nascent music streaming app; and, last week, “walked away” from Merlin’s attempts to negotiate a renewed collective license for the 30,000 indie labels and distributors it represents. Instead, citing issues around fraudulent content, TikTok is only pursuing direct deals with Merlin’s member labels.
The UMG feud in particular seemed to represent a major turning point in TikTok’s perception of the value of music. The stalemate, which lasted from February to May, essentially took the small experiments done in Australia and brought them to a global stage with the world’s single largest catalog. Everyone from stars like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Drake and the Weeknd, down to small artists signed to labels using UMG distributor Virgin, were removed from the platform overnight. If any event would have proved that music had negotiating power over TikTok, it would’ve been this one — but the impact was much more limited than the music biz would have hoped.
From talking to TikTok users during the UMG feud, many felt that the app experience was largely the same. Rarely, if ever, would anyone find a video on their “For You Page” with muted UMG audio. Whatever unknowable algorithm controls that feed simply adjusted to serve videos with still-available songs instead, seamlessly. The only time a user would notice the difference is if they were making a video themselves and realized they couldn’t find songs from a UMG-affiliated artist.
Plus, UMG artists big and small proved that they still wanted to make content for the app, even though doing so diminished the pressure UMG could put on TikTok to improve their compensation. Some UMG artists played their songs live instead of using the UMG-owned recording. Others would use unauthorized remixes (including sped up, slowed down and mashed up versions) of their UMG-controlled songs. Some ended up striking direct deals with the platform or finding contractual workarounds to skirt the ban, and the final nail in the coffin seemingly came when Taylor Swift’s catalog suddenly came back to TikTok on April 11 —– complete with a special campaign around her then-upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department.
When the two companies finally reached a deal three weeks later, just before UMG’s next earnings call, UMG chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge spoke triumphantly about the new TikTok deal. “This new chapter in our relationship with TikTok focuses on the value of music, the primacy of human artistry and the welfare of the creative community,” Grainge said. It’s quite possible that, with the new deal, UMG extracted many of the concessions that it wanted from TikTok.
Still, overall, the effects of the three-month standoff were pretty limited: many TikTok users didn’t notice a change, while UMG’s stream count went unaffected. The key takeaway is that artists, desperate for promotion, would still make musical content for the app for free, even if it infringed on their own unlicensed copyrights. It became a race to the bottom, like so many other things in music.
So it comes as little surprise that when Merlin’s TikTok license came up for renegotiation, TikTok played hardball —– or rather, TikTok just refused to play ball with Merlin altogether.
Instead, TikTok wants to license its 30,000 indie record label members individually — a move which Merlin sees as an attempt to “fractionalize” members to “minimize” licensing costs, according to a letter Merlin sent to its labels last week.
The whole idea of Merlin — which says it represents 15% of music repertoire globally — is for these small, individual labels to be able to band together and negotiate deal terms with digital partners that are at least in the same neighborhood as their bigger major label brethren. Antitrust laws prevent Merlin from telling its members what to do, meaning TikTok is technically free to negotiate individually and bypass their coalition. Even if Merlin could pull such a move to band together its membership against TikTok, it’s hard to imagine a boycott of indie music going any better than UMG’s.
Optically, it’s one thing for TikTok to stand up to the biggest music company in the world and argue that UMG had put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters” in an attempt to lower the rates it had to pay the label. It’s another entirely for the app, which has over a billion users, to lowball the little guys.
Overshadowing all of this, of course, is the fact that TikTok’s corporate parent Bytedance is in a court battle with the U.S. government that, if it loses, could mean it would be forced to sell its U.S. business. In preparation, TikTok is likely cutting costs wherever it can. Given how tough it is for the music industry to walk away from TikTok, it’s unfortunately one of the easiest places to start.
So what is the value of music to TikTok? It’s been a moving target throughout the company’s history. In light of recent events, however, I’ll let you be the judge.
This story was published as part of Billboard’s new music technology newsletter ‘Machine Learnings.’ Sign up for ‘Machine Learnings,’ and Billboard’s other newsletters, here.
At the end of 2022, pop singer-songwriter Mark Ambor felt lost in his music career. Despite recently signing a record deal and releasing his debut EP, Hello World, something didn’t feel right.
“I fell into this routine of teasing a song, [and] if it did well, putting it out, but I was feeling like I wasn’t saying anything I really mean,” he remembers. “I wasn’t digging deep or singing about things important to me.”
To clear his mind, Ambor, 26, embarked on a months-long international backpacking trip with his then-girlfriend — and returned feeling grounded with a whole new wave of inspiration for songs. He quickly wrote the whimsical, acoustic “Good to Be” and now refers to it as the first time he was musically “genuine and fully expressing myself.”
Just a few months later, he struck gold: While playing guitar in his bedroom, he wrote the lyrics, “You and me belong together/Like cold iced tea and warmer weather,” which would become the instantly catchy hook to the cozy, uplifting “Belong Together,” his ultimate breakthrough and first Billboard Hot 100 hit.
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Meredith Jenks
Ambor grew up with a musical background in Pleasantville, N.Y., playing the piano from a young age at his parents’ request. Though the skill took a backseat in high school, he rekindled his love for the instrument as he approached graduation, trading the classical pieces he previously learned for modern-day pop songs. He proceeded to pen his first song that summer, as he grappled with the emotions of having to leave his small hometown to attend Fairfield University in Connecticut. “I didn’t want to leave home,” he says, “and I tried to write a song to get those feelings out.”
He then returned to work that night as a barback and casually sent the song to his parents in a group chat. “My mom was like, ‘Dad and I love this song. Who’s the artist?’ ” he recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Mom, what do you mean?’ It’s me!”
Ambor self-released a few songs while obtaining a marketing degree in college, and upon his graduation in 2020, decided to take six months to completely immerse himself in chasing his dreams as a musician before considering a different job. “COVID happened after I said that,” he recalls. “I got to spend time working on music at home.”
Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, he joined TikTok later that year. He steadily began to grow a following with his cool guy next door vibe: People gravitated not only toward his big smile and curly brown hair, but to his voice and disarming demeanor as well. He soon began posting covers — including breathtaking renditions of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” — as well as a few originals, and ultimately caught the attention of then-independent manager Kyle Thomson, who admits he’s a “sucker” for a great voice over a piano melody and asked Ambor to send a few demos.
“It was so early on in both of our careers,” says Thomson. “I was excited to dive into something that I felt was going to be a fun project to build.” By the end of 2020, Ambor had signed a management deal with Thomson.
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Like Ambor, Thomson knew that some of his artist’s early work wasn’t playing to the singer-songwriter’s strengths. “At the beginning, he told me he wanted to make early 2000s festival, opera-rock music, like Passion Pit or Grouplove,” he says. “I was like, ‘That doesn’t make sense for what I think your qualities are. Why would you take your natural, raspy voice and distort it with synths?’ What he meant [initially] was that he wanted to make music that made him feel the same way that those bands made people feel.”
But after hearing “Belong Together” for the first time, Thomson knew that Ambor had succeeded in his mission. On the heels of his release of “Good to Be” in October 2023 — and its growing popularity on a global scale — Ambor began to tease the forthcoming new track in late December. And following a few months of building hype on TikTok, “Belong Together” arrived on streaming services on Feb. 16.
Ambor continued to stoke the fire well after its release, posting many videos on the platform of him walking the streets of major European cities while on tour and singing its dialed-up final chorus, several of which have compiled more than 10 million views each. Per Thomson, user-generated content and influencer marketing was crucial in making “Belong Together” “as big as humanly possible.”
By May 11, the single debuted at No. 87 on the Hot 100. It later reached a No. 74 high — and has spent 21 weeks and counting on the ranking. It has also reached Nos. 24 and 20 peaks on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. and Pop Airplay charts, respectively. “Belong Together” has earned 141.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams and 610.2 million official on-demand global streams through Sept. 26, according to Luminate.
“It has been really surreal to write something that is so heartfelt and authentic to myself and then feel it resonate around the world the way it has,” Ambor reflects. “The way a song can mean something to a fan that’s different than my own experience, but it’s their own story that they’ve attached to a song of mine … that part blows my mind.”
Meredith Jenks
In August, Ambor’s debut album, Rockwood, arrived through Hundred Days/Virgin Music Group, despite some hesitation from the rest of his team to put out a full project too quickly. (Ambor notes the success of “Belong Together” helped in convincing them otherwise.) He split with the label soon after its release, and while he doesn’t divulge much on specifics, he emphasizes trusting his gut while continuing to grow his career.
“I think people sometimes get too caught in the industry of it all,” he says. “Maybe I’ll sign to a major; maybe I’ll stay independent forever. What really matters is putting out good music and meeting and talking to the fans.”
“He has the best work ethic of anyone I’ve ever met,” adds Thomson. “Mark thinks that he can be Taylor Swift, and I’m not going to stop him.”
A version of this story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.