TikTok, the platform greatest often known as “the app the place individuals dance round to music,” is dropping quite a lot of music and going to lose extra.
However it could have a backup plan: pictures!
From The Wall Avenue Journal, in a complete piece concerning the escalating standoff between TikTok and Common Music Group, the world’s largest file label:
The Journal’s story comes because the combat between UMG and TikTok is widening: Earlier this month, Common required TikTok to take down songs it owned, which meant a number of the hottest artists on the earth, like Taylor Swift, Drake, and Unhealthy Bunny, began to go silent.
Since Common’s music was taken down, TikTok has inspired creators to submit extra photograph content material by suggesting they may get extra likes and feedback in the event that they do. “Picture posts get 1.9x extra likes and a couple of.9x extra feedback on common than movies,” mentioned one notification despatched to creators Feb. 12 and considered by The Wall Avenue Journal.
Now the combat is spreading to Common’s music-publishing catalog, which implies songs by artists who file for different labels however are written — even partly — by Common’s songwriters can disappear as properly.
The bans apply to each movies posted by the artists themselves and a much-larger pool of user-generated movies that use music within the background.
It is a combat that might final for a while. So TikTok seems to be telling creators, not subtly, they must spend extra time making photograph slideshows and fewer time worrying about movies.
It isn’t a brand new suggestion — a TikTok rep tells me the corporate has been pushing photograph posts since spring 2023, and says the marketing campaign has nothing to do with its UMG dispute — however it takes on extra resonance now.
A few ideas about this:
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This can be a reminder that TikTok, like all massive platforms, can push and pull customers to make sure sorts of content material utilizing totally different carrots and sticks. See: horizontal movies and procuring movies. So, if it actually needs to encourage extra photograph slideshows, it will probably positively try this.
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I’ve seen fairly just a few photograph posts just lately, although I don’t know whether or not they’ve spiked in reputation. However I additionally know that lots of these posts even have music. So I ponder whether they will be much less fascinating to creators if they can not use the music they need as a rating behind them.
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Whereas tales just like the one you are studying now give attention to the truth that TikTok is dropping entry to music from a number of the most well-known individuals on the earth, I am curious to understand how essential that music actually is to TikTok customers. As a result of in my TikTok expertise, you typically hear quite a lot of music that is not from massive artists and, in truth, comes from artists customers probably cannot establish and are utilizing simply because they’ve encountered it by way of an inexplicable TikTok meme. Like this tune, from an indie band known as The King Khan & BBQ Present, which got here out in 2004 after which randomly went viral on TikTok in 2022. It presumably will not be affected by the UMG combat:
February 28, 2024 — This story has been up to date with a remark from TikTok.
