On Thursday, Taylor Swift made a comeback on TikTok. Despite the signer’s record label, Universal Music, and the Chinese short-video app remaining at loggerheads over artist compensation and artificial intelligence.
The Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, went to war with TikTok earlier this year over licensing terms, songs by hundreds of its artists were removed from the platform, and have remained absent.
Swift’s music returns one week before the release of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department.
Unlike many other artists, the pop superstar owns the copyrights to her recordings through a 2018 deal struck with Universal that lets her control where her work is made available. Universal Music ceased licensing its content to TikTok and TikTok Music services when their previous agreement expired on 31 January.
Universal Music, the biggest music company in the world published a blistering open letter the day before the agreement expired, accusing TikTok of bullying and intimidation, and complaining of “how little TikTok compensates artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly rising advertising revenue and increasing reliance on music content.”
TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, called this “a false narrative” and said that Universal Music Group had “chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent”.
TikTok subsequently removed thousands of songs from its platform and muted the videos that featured those songs, written by any songwriter signed on to Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG).
This meant some of the world’s most popular music – including by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Harry Styles, Drake, Sting, the Weekend, Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Adele, U2, Coldplay and Post Malone – all disappeared from TikTok’s library.
TikTok, Universal Music and representatives for Swift did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A number of Taylor Swift’s songs reappeared in TikTok’s official Library
A number of songs by Swift — whose new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out next week — have reappeared in TikTok’s official music library, where they are available for the service’s millions of users to place in the background of their own videos. Those videos have become one of the music industry’s most important promotional vehicles, with the potential to mint new hits or breathe new life into old tunes — even as many artists and labels complain about low royalties from the service.
The available songs from the popstar’s albums appeared to be from the period since she signed with Universal in 2018, including her worldwide hits like ‘Lover’, ‘Anti-Hero’, ‘Cruel Summer’ and ‘Cardigan’. Also her “Taylor’s version” re-recordings of older hits like “Style,” “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” which were originally released by her first label, Big Machine are available. After Big Machine was sold in 2019 without her participation, Swift announced plans to rerecord her first six studio albums, and has already released four of those. Each went straight to No. 1.
It was not immediately clear how Swift’s songs made it back to TikTok while Universal’s ban remains in place. When the company announced its plans to remove music earlier this year, it said its licensing contract with TikTok expired in January this year itself. By the early hours of Feb 1, Universal’s music began to disappear from TikTok, and millions of videos that used the label’s music went silent.
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