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Universal Music’s Stand Against TikTok Defends Artists’ Rights (Guest Column)
In this guest column, Jonathan Taplin of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab defends Universal Music Group's stand against TikTok.
Jonathan Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the author of “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto.” He was tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band in 1969. I remember debating publicly John Perry Barlow, a songwriter for the Grateful Dead and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about how Napster was decimating the record royalty earnings of most of my musician friends, including my former employer, Levon Helm of the Band. As Herstand references, Universal wrote an open letter to the artist and songwriter community, which outlines TikTok’s offenses against music, its creators and its fans, summarized here:
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