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Who’s Getting Hurt in the Universal Music-TikTok Standoff? Artists and Songwriters (Guest Column)
In this guest column, musician-author Ari Herstad argues that artists and creators are the ones most hurt by the Universal Music-TikTok battle.
However, for many of those artists and songwriters, the move is actually having the opposite effect: What has been overlooked in the war of words between both UMG and TikTok is the very real impact on the human beings who make the music. The power of the platform — and pressure from the labels — has essentially forced artists into becoming content creators, making videos that often have very little to do with their art in a desperate effort to “go viral,” or at least drive traffic for their music. The major music companies have a problematic history with tech — most egregiously, their strategy of suing fans for illegal downloading during the Napster era of the early 2000s — that usually consists of lawsuits, takedown orders, and talking tough to impress Wall Street, instead of coming up with innovative solutions.
Or read this on Variety