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More Than One Third of TikTok’s Most Popular Songs Are Gone After UMG Fallout
With Universal Music Group and TikTok clashing over licensing terms, a number of tracks on Billboard’s TikTok Top 50 chart can no longer be used on the app
In addition, TikTok has long had a vibrant bootleg scene, which means that in some cases, users have uploaded their own versions of UMG songs or made remixes in place of the official sounds. A marketer who oversaw the campaign for a single that was used in roughly half a million TikTok videos, earning billions of views, found that his artist took home less than $5,000 from the platform. It was no surprise when UMG CEO Lucian Grainge fired a warning shot late in 2022, noting pointedly at an industry conference that a value gap was “forming fast in the new iterations of short-form video.”
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