Recently, TikTok’s licensing deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) expired.
On January 31, music from popular artists like Drake, Taylor Swift, The Weekend, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, SZA, Adele, Kendrick Lamar and countless others were removed from TikTok.
UMG claimed this was due to TikTok paying much less than other platforms, and UMG claimed that TikTok only made up about 1% of their revenue.
By removing music from all artists signed to UMG off TikTok, consumers won’t be able to make videos with many of their favorite songs and all old videos made with those songs will be muted.
“I’m very sad that they removed music from every UMG artist off TikTok,” said senior Izzy Zaro.
“I like to look back at the videos I made with my friends and now most of the videos have their audio muted.”
Although many mainstream artists will no longer have their music on TikTok, this will give more opportunities to new up and coming artists.
“I’m really sad that Drake’s music isn’t on TikTok anymore,” senior Ty Sorenson said. “But I am excited to see which new artists will blow up in the next few months.”
Even though UMG took off the official songs, TikTok users are still finding ways to post videos to their favorite songs.
“When I woke up I was expecting to see lots of music I’d never seen before,” junior Kami Fuchs said. “But I was happy to see that TikTok users still posted videos to sounds that weren’t officially licensed by UMG.”
Even though UMG removing all the music they have licensing rights to from TikTok is a big hit to the app,
TikTok will still continue being one of the biggest social media apps in the world.
The lack of music from many mainstream artists will open new opportunities for unknown and small artists to make a name for themselves and become household names.