TikTok, the platform best known as “the app where people dance around to music,” is losing a lot of music and going to lose more.
But it may have a backup plan: photos!
From The Wall Street Journal, in a comprehensive piece about the escalating standoff between TikTok and Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label:
The Journal’s story comes as the fight between UMG and TikTok is widening: Earlier this month, Universal required TikTok to take down songs it owned, which meant some of the most popular artists in the world, like Taylor Swift, Drake, and Bad Bunny, started to go silent.
Since Universal’s music was taken down, TikTok has encouraged creators to post more photo content by suggesting they will get more likes and comments if they do. “Photo posts get 1.9x more likes and 2.9x more comments on average than videos,” said one notification sent to creators Feb. 12 and viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Now the fight is spreading to Universal’s music-publishing catalog, which means songs by artists who record for other labels but are written — even in part — by Universal’s songwriters can disappear as well.
The bans apply to both videos posted by the artists themselves and a much-larger pool of user-generated videos that use music in the background.
It’s a fight that could last for some time. So TikTok appears to be telling creators, not subtly, they ought to spend more time making photo slideshows and less time worrying about videos.
It’s not a new suggestion — a TikTok rep tells me the company has been pushing photo posts since spring 2023, and says the campaign has nothing to do with its UMG dispute — but it takes on additional resonance now.
A couple of thoughts about this:
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This is a reminder that TikTok, like all big platforms, can push and pull users to make certain kinds of content using different carrots and sticks. See: horizontal videos and shopping videos. So, if it really wants to encourage more photo slideshows, it can definitely do that.
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I’ve seen quite a few photo posts recently, though I have no idea whether they’ve spiked in popularity. But I also know that many of those posts also have music. So I wonder whether they’ll be less interesting to creators if they can’t use the music they want as a score behind them.
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While stories like the one you’re reading now focus on the fact that TikTok is losing access to music from some of the most famous people in the world, I’m curious to know how crucial that music really is to TikTok users. Because in my TikTok experience, you often hear a lot of music that isn’t from big artists and, in fact, comes from artists users likely can’t identify and are using just because they’ve encountered it via an inexplicable TikTok meme. Like this song, from an indie band called The King Khan & BBQ Show, which came out in 2004 and then randomly went viral on TikTok in 2022. It presumably won’t be affected by the UMG fight:
February 28, 2024 — This story has been updated with a comment from TikTok.
