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TikTok on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the federal law that would ban the popular platform in the United States unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell it.
Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance urged the justices to step in before the law’s Jan. 19 deadline. A similar plea was expected from content creators who rely on the platform for income and some of TikTok’s more than 170 million users in the U.S.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
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The case could attract the court’s interest because it pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
The request first goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in the nation’s capital. He almost certainly will seek input from all nine justices.
On Friday, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied an emergency plea to block the law, a procedural ruling that allowed the case to move to the Supreme Court.
The same panel had earlier unanimously upheld the law over a First Amendment challenge claiming that it violated free speech rights.
Without a court-ordered freeze, the law would take effect Jan. 19 and expose app stores that offer TikTok and internet hosting services that support it to potential fines.
It would be up to the Justice Department to enforce the law, investigating possible violations and seeking sanctions. But lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the Justice Department might pause enforcement or otherwise seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences because President-elect Donald Trump pledged during the campaign that he would “save TikTok.”
Trump takes office a day after the law goes into effect.
The Supreme Court could temporarily put the law on hold so that they can give fuller consideration to First Amendment and other issues.
On the other hand, the justices could reject the emergency appeal, which would allow the law to take effect as scheduled.
The case has made a relatively quick trip through the courts once bipartisan majorities in Congress approved the law and President Joe Biden signed it in April.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
Lay Bankz’s “Tell Ur Girlfriend” sounds as if someone sliced up Ginuwine’s “Pony” and Omarion’s “Ice Box,” tossed them in a blender with a four-to-the-floor kick drum, and served up the results. “It felt like a hit to us,” says Alec Henderson, head of digital at Banks’ label, Artist Partner Group. “But labels never really call the hits.”
In this climate, labels sometimes give up on songs that aren’t immediately greeted rapturously by listeners. But APG stuck with “Tell Ur Girlfriend,” running TikTok campaigns that played on the track’s saucy lyrics: “Should tell my boyfriend what I been doin’/ Been thinkin’ of you every time I screw him.” “We really believed in that song,” Henderson says.
Their faith was rewarded when two creators developed a dance set to the track. On TikTok, where trends bloom and die out rapidly, dance trends are ancient history — they were more common back in the platform’s early days, 2019 and 2020. But the “Tell Ur Girlfriend” dance “just went crazy,” according to Henderson. The song cracked the TikTok Billboard Top 50 chart in April. A week later, “Tell Ur Girlfriend,” debuted at No. 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 (dated April 27), thanks to nearly 9 million official U.S. streams, according to Luminate.
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Lay Bankz’s hit was one of 24 songs that appeared on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 before jumping to the Hot 100 in the first 11-ish months of 2024. (“Tell Ur Girlfriend” ended up spending three weeks at No. 1 on the former chart.) That’s a considerable number, but still ultimately a small percentage of the platform’s biggest 2024 hits: More than 600 songs appeared on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 during this period, showing that even hard-won virality on the massively popular app does not necessarily correlate with widespread listening activity.
Even so, marketers say it remains an essential plank of most campaigns — sometimes the only plank. “All roads lead back to TikTok at this point, in some capacity,” says Amy Hart, who worked at the digital marketing agency Flighthouse and the label 10k Projects before co-founding prairy, a new indie label. This remains true, she continues, even though “the odds of actually starting something from scratch are so small.”
TikTok is usually portrayed as an initiator, the platform that kicks off the chain-reaction that later creates a hit. The potential power of this approach can be seen when looking at the songs that made the leap from the TikTok Billboard Top 50 to the Hot 100 this year: They often climbed to the upper reaches of the chart — their average peak position was No. 18 on the Hot 100 — and they spent a healthy 20 weeks on the chart. (In total, 88 songs appeared on both the TikTok Billboard Top 50 and the Hot 100, including 37 that appeared on the two rankings the same week, and 27 tracks that did a reverse crossover, showing up on the Hot 100 first and then appearing on the TikTok Billboard Top 50.)
Digital marketers who focus on TikTok will face additional challenges in 2025. Most important, the future of TikTok is an open question (again). Federal judges recently upheld a law requiring Bytedance to sell the app by January 19th or face a ban in the U.S., where some 170 million people use TikTok.
The outcome of that fight is outside of marketers’ control. But closer to home, “the biggest thing that I’ve noticed is influencer campaigns just don’t work,” Hart says.
In TikTok’s early days, paying a creator with a following to make a video with an artist’s song was common, relatively cheap, and occasionally effective. While it’s still common, it’s now expensive and often worthless. “I’m starting to put less and less faith in influencer marketing as a vehicle for the distribution of and marketing of music,” says Sam Alavi, who co-manages the artist bbno$. (bbno$’s “It Boy” hit No. 10 on the TikTok Billboard Top 50 this year.)
Some marketers have instead looked to contest platforms, which recruit a pool of creators and offer them cash prizes to make videos with specific songs, awarding the money to the clips that get the most engagement. This ties performance to payment, in contrast to traditional influencer approach — most influencers charge a flat rate, so they get paid the same whether their video gets two views or 2 million.
The contest platforms offer “a much easier way to get a volume of sound uses” compared to reaching out to one influencer at a time, explains Marisa Kurtz, vp of marketing at Fearless Records. “And the contest element does encourage creators to make thoughtful videos in the hopes of getting the most views.”
Other executives haven’t seen as much success with this approach, however. “We’ve actually been working on moving away from contest-style campaigns in the last seven or eight months,” says Rafael Rocha, CEO of the marketing agency NuWave Digital. “Those are, in our view, also becoming inefficient and oversaturated.”
Another strategy that has caught on with marketers is to create and oversee their own artist fan pages, which can shotgun posts onto TikTok at a low cost. These accounts operate as if you had “a media outlet at your disposal at all times,” Laura Spinelli, digital marketing manager for Shopkeeper Management, told Billboard earlier this year. Tim Collins, co-founder of the digital marketing agency Creed Media, noted that fan pages “can tell the story of an artist without the artist having to be the voice.”
One thing is certain: Whatever approach works now is unlikely to work in three to six months. “Tik Tok is always moving and changing,” Hart says. As a result, marketers have to continuously adjust their approach.
“As much as we all like to think that we can sit down at this table and be like, ‘This is the thing that’s going to go viral,’’ Alavi adds, “none of us f–king know.”
TikTok is taking the Canadian government to court.
Last month, the popular social media app was ordered by the federal government to “wind down” its operations in Canada following a national security review.
“We will challenge this order in court,” TikTok said at the time.
Now, the company is following through on the promise. TikTok Canada has filed notice of application for judicial review, which is an official legal challenge to the decision.
“This order would eliminate the jobs and livelihoods of our hundreds of dedicated local employees – who support the community of more than 14 million monthly Canadian users on TikTok, including businesses, advertisers, creators, and initiatives developed especially for Canada,” the company wrote on its official website. “We believe it’s in the best interest of Canadians to find a meaningful solution and ensure that a local team remains in place, alongside the TikTok platform.”
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TikTok posted the whole legal filing on its website, which you can read here. The document breaks down the order of events, suggesting TikTok cooperated with the security review but was surprised by the abrupt announcement.
The company is requesting a court date to challenge the decision in Vancouver, B.C., one of the two locations of its offices. The other is in Toronto.
The filing calls the order “grossly disproportionate” and says it “will result in the termination of hundreds of employees in Canada and the potential termination of over 250,000 contracts with Canadian-based advertisers.”
The legal filing also focuses on the impact to those creators who use the platform, stating that the order “will cause the destruction of significant economic opportunities and intangible benefits to Canadian creators, artists and businesses, and the Canadian cultural community more broadly.”
The federal government made the decision to shut down TikTok’s Canadian operations following a review of its Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd., calling the operation “injurious to national security.” Canadian users would still be able to use and access TikTok, but the company would be forced to close its offices in Canada.
The filing follows a new law in the United States that would require ByteDance to divest TikTok by January 19, 2025 or face a ban in the country. – Richard Trapunski
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Charlotte Day Wilson to Play Special Orchestral Concert in Toronto in 2025
Charlotte Day Wilson is preparing for a hometown concert that she calls “a dream opportunity.”
On Feb. 28, 2025, the Grammy nominated R&B/soul singer-songwriter will play a Red Bull Symphonic concert with members of the the Symphonic Orchestra at Roy Thomson Hall, the home of the acclaimed Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Charlotte Day
Emily Lipson
Tickets go on sale Friday, December 13, 2024 at redbull.ca/symphonic.
Previous editions of Red Bull Symphonic in Atlanta and Los Angeles have featured Rick Ross and Metro Boomin, plus special guests including John Legend, Swae Lee and more.
It will be the first orchestral concert for Wilson, and she’s approaching it as a full vision of her current state as a musician.
“I want people to come away from it understanding the musical makeup that I have and of my sense of self within music,” Charlotte Day Wilson tells Billboard Canada over Zoom from her apartment in Toronto.
She’s still in her early 30s, but Wilson has been recording and performing for well over a decade. With two albums and multiple EPs, she has a full body of work to play from, and she’s excited to rethink it in a new context.
Her 2024 album, Cyan Blue, has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Engineered Album, and though Jack Rochon was the primary engineer, Wilson says the two of them made everything in the room together as “an exchange of two people producing and engineering and writing all in tandem.”
Charlotte Day Wilson’s soulful voice and songwriting chops have become a secret weapon for many renowned musicians. She’s performed and collaborated with Kaytranada, Daniel Caesar, Mustafa, BadBadNotGood and Nelly Furtado, and one of her songs was even sampled by Drake.
The Grammy recognition and the ability to do a full-scale orchestral concert feels like a mark of wider recognition in a field that can often include a lot of isolation. It also feels like a “maturing moment,” she says, which fits her mindset right now.
“It’s something I think about a lot as an artist,” she says. “In an industry that is ruthlessly obsessed with youth, how do we graduate into a next chapter of life and still maintain our integrity and relevance. That’s something I think about all the time, and it’s something I want to approach really deliberately.” – R.T.
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Patrick Watson’s ‘Je te laisserai des mots’ Becomes First French-Language Song To Hit A Billion Spotify Streams
Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson has made history on Spotify.
His 2010 song “Je te laisserai des mots” is now the first French-language song to hit a billion streams on the platform.
The song, a wistful composition led by piano and strings, was first written for the 2009 film Mères et Filles.
Listeners clearly agreed that the song has a cinematic quality: it went viral in 2021 and 2022, used by thousands of TikTokers — including Justin Bieber — to soundtrack serene or sad moments in their own lives during Covid restrictions.
Watson joins Bieber and other Canadian artists like Drake, Tate McRae, Alessia Cara and Shawn Mendes in Spotify’s Billions Club. Most of the other Canadian members are major label signees with a pop-oriented sound, which makes Watson — an acclaimed indie singer-songwriter represented by Montreal’s Secret City Records — a more unusual entry into the club.
“Je te laisserai des mots” was the most-streamed French language track both in Canada and globally this year on Spotify, while the veteran songwriter and producer is the No. 6 most popular Québécois artist on Spotify this year in Canada. He finishes alongside Quebec legends Les Cowboys Fringants and Celine Dion, pop star Charlotte Cardin and rappers Souldia and Enima.
Spotify notes that since 2019, listening to music in French has jumped by 94% on the app — which means after Watson, another Billions Club French-language song could only be a matter of time. – Rosie Long Decter
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Music Business Year In Review
A federal appeals court panel on Friday upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in a few short months, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law, which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January, is constitutional, rebuffing TikTok’s challenge that the statute ran afoul of the First Amendment and unfairly targeted the platform.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
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TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term and whose Justice Department would have to enforce the law, said during the presidential campaign that he is now against a TikTok ban and would work to “save” the social media platform.
The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, culminated a years-long saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.
The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect.
However, a significant portion of the government’s information in the case has been redacted and hidden from the public as well as the two companies.
TikTok, which sued the government over the law in May, has long denied it could be used by Beijing to spy on or manipulate Americans. Its attorneys have accurately pointed out that the U.S. hasn’t provided evidence to show that the company handed over user data to the Chinese government, or manipulated content for Beijing’s benefit in the U.S. They have also argued the law is predicated on future risks, which the Department of Justice has emphasized pointing in part to unspecified action it claims the two companies have taken in the past due to demands from the Chinese government.
Friday’s ruling came after the appeals court panel heard oral arguments in September.
Some legal experts said at the time that it was challenging to read the tea leaves on how the judges would rule.
In a court hearing that lasted more than two hours, the panel – composed of two Republican and one Democrat appointed judges – appeared to grapple with how TikTok’s foreign ownership affects its rights under the Constitution and how far the government could go to curtail potential influence from abroad on a foreign-owned platform.
The judges pressed Daniel Tenny, a Department of Justice attorney, on the implications the case could have on the First Amendment. But they also expressed some skepticism at TikTok’s arguments, challenging the company’s attorney – Andrew Pincus – on whether any First Amendment rights preclude the government from curtailing a powerful company subject to the laws and influence of a foreign adversary.
In parts of their questions about TikTok’s ownership, the judges cited wartime precedent that allows the U.S. to restrict foreign ownership of broadcast licenses and asked if the arguments presented by TikTok would apply if the U.S. was engaged in war.
To assuage concerns about the company’s owners, TikTok says it has invested more than $2 billion to bolster protections around U.S. user data.
The company also argues the government’s broader concerns could have been resolved in a draft agreement it provided the Biden administration more than two years ago during talks between the two sides. It has blamed the government for walking away from further negotiations on the agreement, which the Justice Department argues is insufficient.
Attorneys for the two companies have claimed it’s impossible to divest the platform commercially and technologically. They also say any sale of TikTok without the coveted algorithm – the platform’s secret sauce that Chinese authorities would likely block under any divesture plan – would turn the U.S. version of TikTok into an island disconnected from other global content.
Still, some investors, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire Frank McCourt, have expressed interest in purchasing the platform. Both men said earlier this year that they were launching a consortium to purchase TikTok’s U.S. business.
This week, a spokesperson for McCourt’s Project Liberty initiative, which aims to protect online privacy, said unnamed participants in their bid have made informal commitments of more than $20 billion in capital.
TikTok’s lawsuit was consolidated with a second legal challenge brought by several content creators — for which the company is covering legal costs — as well as a third one filed on behalf of conservative creators who work with a nonprofit called BASED Politics Inc.
If TikTok appeals and the courts continue to uphold the law, it would fall on Trump’s Justice Department to enforce it and punish any potential violations with fines. The penalties would apply to app stores that would be prohibited from offering TikTok, and internet hosting services that would be barred from supporting it.
FloyyMenor and Cris MJ‘s “Gata Only” was the top song on TikTok globally in 2024. “Gata Only” also cracked the top 10 in the U.S., according to the platform’s announcement on Wednesday (Dec. 4), although Tommy Richman‘s “MILLION DOLLAR BABY (VHS)” was the biggest TikTok song stateside.
Catalog songs did not appear to perform as well on the app in 2024. In the U.S., almost every one of the top tracks was new, with the exception of Blood Orange’s “Champagne Coast,” a gauzy, yearning cut from 2011.
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In 2022, in contrast, catalog accounted for four of the top 10 songs in the U.S.: Pharrell’s “Just A Cloud Away,” Labrinth’s “Forever,” WILLOW’s “Wait a Minute!” and Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).” And in 2023, older songs like Justine Sky’s “Collide,” PARTYNEXTDOOR’s “Her Way,” and Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” were embraced by TikTok users, rocketing into the platform’s top 10.
At the same time, sped-up tracks did not have as much success on TikTok as they have had in the past, despite other streaming platforms’ growing interest in trying to tap into the sped-up craze. In 2023 in particular, the four most popular songs on TikTok in the U.S. were all sped-up. But this year, no sped-up songs appeared in the top 10 Stateside — or in the U.K., or in the global ranking.
“Gata Only” initially became popular in Chile — Floyymenor’s home — before spreading to Mexico, Argentina, and the rest of Latin America, according to Mike Weiss, head of A&R at UnitedMasters, which signed the singer. “After the regional growth, TikTok became the springboard that pushed the song into the U.S.,” Weiss continues. “The real moment when non-Spanish speakers started using the sound with videos like ‘POV: You don’t speak Spanish but can’t stop listening to this song.’”
That trend was soon launching 30,000 videos per day. “Next thing we knew,” Weiss says, “‘Gata Only’ was huge in Italy, France, and everywhere around the world, even places where you wouldn’t expect a Spanish language song to explode.”
Alongside FloyyMenor’s breakout single, other major hits on TikTok in the U.S. include Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s “Carnival” and Lay Bankz’s “Tell Ur Girlfriend.” Along with “Champagne Coast” and “Million Dollar Baby,” this means that half of the Top 10 were releases from independent labels. (Though parts of the indie community currently have a contentious relationship with TikTok.)
“Tell Ur Girlfriend” went viral in part thanks to a dance trend — a throwback to an earlier time on TikTok. “These young girls made this amazing dance, and we started to spend heavily on it, having influencers do it,” recalls Alec Henderson, head of digital at Artist Partner Group, which signed Bankz. “Most of last year and the first half of this year, dancing was not what was popular on TikTok anymore. This one brought that nostalgia-dancing thing back to life.”
Bankz, FloyyMenor, and Richman were dominant in the U.S. and also appeared in the top 10 globally. Billie Eilish was the only other artist to manage this, with her glossy hit “Birds of a Feather.”
U.S. Top 10 TikTok Songs:“MILLION DOLLAR BABY (VHS)” – Tommy Richman“CARNIVAL” – ¥$ & Kanye West & Ty Dolla $ign feat. Rich The Kid & Playboi Carti“Tell Ur Girlfriend” – Lay Bankz“Type Shit” – Future & Metro Boomin & Travis Scott & Playboi Carti“Never Lose Me” – Flo Milli“Champagne Coast” – Blood Orange“BIRDS OF A FEATHER” – Billie Eilish“Magic Johnson” – ian“TGIF”- GloRilla“Gata Only” – FloyyMenor & Cris MJ
Global Top 10 TikTok Songs:“Gata Only” – FloyyMenor & Cris MJ“Pedro” – Jaxomy & Agatino Romero & Raffaella Carrà“Alibi” – Sevdaliza feat. Pabllo Vittar & Yseult“MILLION DOLLAR BABY (VHS)” – Tommy Richman“Tell Ur Girlfriend” – Lay Bankz“La Diabla” – Xavi“Nasty” – Tinashe“BIRDS OF A FEATHER” – Billie Eilish“Forever Young” – Alphaville“Beautiful Things” – Benson Boone
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TikTok took another step to integrate itself deeper into the music streaming ecosystem on Thursday (Nov. 7), as Spotify and Apple Music users gained the ability to easily share songs on the short-form video app — posting them to their For You Page, for example, or sharing them via DM.
When TikTok’s popularity exploded in 2019 and 2020, it seemed like a competitor to many of the older streaming services. Suddenly users didn’t want to leave the addictive short-form video app to listen to songs elsewhere. TikTok proved to be especially effective at driving music discovery for younger listeners.
So it wasn’t surprising that, when Spotify celebrated new features at its Stream On event in 2023, executives poked at TikTok — “There’s a disconnect between where music is being teased and where music is actually being streamed,” for example — without naming it. In recent months, however, two platforms that once looked like rivals appear increasingly interested in collaboration.
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In November 2023, TikTok unveiled the “Add to Music App” to serve as “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 lengthy song on the music streaming service of their choice,” as Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music business development, said in a statement at the time. In addition, TikTok shuttered its own streaming service, TikTok Music, in September.
At the same time, Spotify has said it is newly focused on finding ways for users to share the music they love. For a long time, “sharing was generally seen as an afterthought to the core features on the Spotify platform,” Priscilla Chan, associate director on the business development team, explained in a blog post in September.
“Now, these partnerships and features are vitally important drivers of the viral loop of growth for Spotify,” she continued. It’s all part of the platform’s goal of “being everywhere where our existing and potential users are” to “extend our global reach.”
The federal government has ordered the dissolution of TikTok in Canada.
Canadian users will still be able to use and access the popular social media app, but the company’s Canadian operations, which has offices in Toronto and Vancouver, have been ordered to “wind down.”
This follows a national security review of TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd.
“The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners,” said Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne in a statement, reported by Canadian Press.
He also told CBC that TikTok’s Canadian operations are potentially “injurious to national security.” He wouldn’t go into specifics, but said “I know Canadians would understand when you’re saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that’s serious.”
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Canadians will still be able to watch TikTok videos and post their own on the app, but the company will no longer be able to conduct business in the country.
TikTok, however, will not leave without a fight.
“Shutting down TikTok’s Canadian offices and destroying hundreds of well-paying local jobs is not in anyone’s best interest, and today’s shutdown order will do just that. We will challenge this order in court,” a spokesperson for TikTok told the national broadcaster.
TikTok has faced similar scrutiny in the United States, with an order for ByteDance to sell the platform or stop operating.
In Canada, a big part of TikTok’s operations revolve around music and it has a number of initiatives to support local creators. In April, the company launched a weekly music chart measuring viral songs on the platform in Canada.
A number of Canadian artists like Lauren Spencer Smith, Alexander Stewart, Crash Adams and, most successfully, Tate McRae, have built successful music careers on TikTok.
More on this story as it develops.
On Sept. 27, indie labels and distributors around the world received a letter from Merlin, the coalition that negotiates their licenses with TikTok and other digital services. “With no warning, TikTok walked away before negotiations even began… they do not want to renew our deal, which expires on October 31st,” Merlin’s letter said.
Instead, Merlin explained, TikTok wanted to forge deals with most of the labels and distributors the coalition represented directly, a move that Merlin read as an attempt to “fragment” its membership and “minimize” payments for indie music. (TikTok says it walked away from negotiations with Merlin due to concerns about fraudulent content from certain Merlin members making its way onto the social media app. The company also says it wanted to form closer relationships with Merlin members.)
TikTok and Merlin both declined to comment for this story.
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Since then, 12 different labels and distributors among the thousands represented by Merlin have spoken to Billboard about what they would do when their licenses expire after Halloween. Will the indies walk away, attempting to take a stand against TikTok in solidarity with Merlin? Will they renew their licenses individually? And if they do, how will those deals compare to what Merlin negotiated previously? (Nearly all of the executives who spoke to Billboard for this story requested anonymity, given most of their respective companies have non-disclosure agreements with TikTok.)
At first, one distribution executive said their company was not yet negotiating its own license with TikTok — because this exec said they were still hopeful that Merlin and TikTok might come back to the negotiating table. “We want to make sure there is no possibility with Merlin first,” the executive said. John Carnell, CEO of Phoenix Music International (PMI), had a similar view. In an email to Merlin, obtained by Billboard, Carnell said that while TikTok has approached Phoenix individually, “There is no way we would undermine Merlin’s position.”
Unlike Universal Music Group (UMG), which pulled its entire label and publishing catalog from TikTok earlier this year when its license with the platform expired amid renewal negotiations, antitrust laws prevent Merlin from forcing its members to move off of TikTok. It can’t even ask its members to collectively strike against TikTok, leaving the coalition with little choice but to accept TikTok’s decision.
Carnell ultimately decided PMI would “not be entering a deal with TikTok,” according to his email, but the other executive holdout took a different tack. This week, in a second interview, the executive said their company had decided to sign a direct deal with TikTok after all. “If I still thought that not signing would help Merlin get a new deal, or could help the independent music community, I would try to not sign,” the distribution executive said. “But even when Universal didn’t sign [a licensing deal], [TikTok] didn’t care… We have no choice [but to sign a new licensing agreement] because our artists want to be on TikTok — perhaps too much — but for them, it is very important.”
This is a commonly held sentiment among Merlin members, many of whom say their artists want to be on TikTok, and they need to oblige — or risk losing talent to competitors. In the last week, both UnitedMasters and Ditto announced that they had signed new agreements with TikTok. Steve Stoute, founder and CEO of UnitedMasters, told Billboard, “I believe we struck a fair deal with TikTok for UnitedMasters and our artists, who understand how valuable promotion can be for their reach… Merlin has done a great job representing independent labels across the world, and I am a proud Merlin member.” TikTok says that now the vast majority of Merlin members have signed direct deals with the company.
Multiple members say TikTok offered them new agreements around the time that Billboard broke the news in late September that Merlin’s negotiations with TikTok had collapsed. But not every member received an offer — which tracks, considering TikTok’s claim that fraudulent activity allegedly stemmed from specific members of Merlin. TikTok’s music licenses typically last two years, and most of the new deals offered this October will expire in late 2026.
Three sources say that the compensation terms provided under the new, individual offers from TikTok are not significantly better or worse than what Merlin previously negotiated, but that there have been some key changes. First, TikTok is now paying out music licensors based on views that videos featuring a song receives, rather than “creates” (how many videos are created with a given song in the background).
Specifically, TikTok will calculate market share based on views, and then the payment will be divided up from there. This does not mean TikTok now pays a certain royalty per view. “It makes sense,” says one indie executive. “I don’t know why they didn’t always pay based on views.” Another exec added, “It won’t lead to a major difference in how much we are paid. We are still doing the math, but it seems like there will be about a 4% difference in what we take in from TikTok, give or take.”
“TikTok was always paying us badly, so none of this is a financial problem in the short term,” says the indie label executive who initially wanted to hold out. “They are one of the biggest social media companies in the world, and the smallest revenue earner for a music company.” Another indie label source had a similar feeling. “It’s a promotional avenue more than anything else,” this person said. “I think there’s value in TikTok deals, but it’s, like, 1% of every company’s books. It’s not a big part of anyone’s business. I truly think the royalty conversation wasn’t the deal breaker, but there were other material terms that we wanted.”
One of those key term changes had to do with “ad credits,” which can also be referenced as “marketing credits.” Three sources said that the deals TikTok sent them did not include these credits, which amount to money offered by TikTok that a label can put toward advertisements and marketing on the app. One source says the previous, Merlin-negotiated agreement guaranteed a budget in the millions for ads and marketing on TikTok, with the sum of credits divided among individual members based on their size. Now, at least some labels, particularly the ones with less bargaining power, might not get them at all.
The three sources also said that while the previous contract included a “most favored nations” (MFN) clause, which gives licensors the right to the same terms and benefits as other licensors who enter similar contracts with TikTok, the new agreements did not. One also said their individual agreement included a new clause requiring “know your customer” (KYC) checks — which would require verification of artists’ identities before allowing them to upload songs — something TikTok says is designed to curb bad actors and fraudsters from getting their music on to TikTok. It also serves to place more responsibility on the labels and distributors for the content they deliver. The executive also claimed, however, that the provision’s language is vague and seems difficult to enforce.
Four sources suggested UMG’s previous licensing dispute with TikTok was the catalyst for TikTok to walk away from Merlin. “[UMG] definitely emboldened TikTok,” says one source close to the situation. “They lost that war, and they created a really bad situation for Merlin. Sony and Warner are up next year, too. If I was them, I’d be terrified right now.”
Still, another indie label executive, whose releases run through a Merlin distributor, holds a different view — that, maybe, TikTok is not so important now after all. “We’re sticking with Merlin,” the executive says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. If this happened a year, two years ago, I’d be freaking out. But these days, TikTok isn’t moving the needle for our artists like it used to.”
While his artists used to “easily get tens of thousands of views on most TikToks without any spend,” he says the social media platform is too “saturated” now, and he’s watched as his artists’ impressions have tanked. He’s not alone. In a recent Billboard story about the modern creator campaign on TikTok, multiple digital marketing sources expressed that it is harder than ever to get a song off the ground on the service. But, as one source put it, “It’s still the best thing we have.”
“But what does not having a deal even mean at this point?” another indie label executive asked. “When these things come down, it just encourages the bootleg use of songs on these platforms. The music will be up, just not properly attributed.” During UMG’s boycott of TikTok earlier this year, it was common to still find Universal songs on the platform, just as bootlegged remixes, not as official audio. Sometimes, to skirt the effects of the boycott, top UMG stars like Olivia Rodrigo would even use these bootlegs to promote their latest releases.
TikTok originally told Merlin members that the deadline to finalize their individual agreements with the service was Oct. 25, but one label executive said they have heard that TikTok has offered extensions to certain members. Three sources believe that smaller Merlin members won’t have room to negotiate past the original boilerplate offer, but the larger players will find more wiggle room. Those who received extensions or finalized deals will not have their music removed from the app today, but TikTok says it has already started removing songs from those members that chose not to strike a deal. The company assures that the vast majority of Merlin members have already cemented their deals.
“I wish it had worked out differently between Merlin and Tiktok,” one Merlin member says. “But if our partnership needs to be direct with ByteDance in order to serve our clients, then you know, that’s the avenue that we have to take. Only time will tell how this all plays out.”
Additional Reporting by Elias Leight
TikTok is reportedly testing a feature that allows fans to pre-save upcoming albums so they will be automatically added to users’ music libraries on Spotify or Apple Music once they’re released. The news of the test was first reported by Music Ally. A rep for the platform declined to comment. Pushing for pre-saves has been […]