Waking up to all your favorite TikTok songs missing? UMG (Universal Music Group) has taken over TikTok removing some of the most popular creators’ music like Taylor Swift, Drake, The Weeknd, Billie Eilish etc, leaving TikTok’s to become muted. The deal between UMG and Tiktok was made on the 1st of February leaving creators wondering if these sounds will ever return.
UMG and TikTok couldn’t make a deal because TikTok didn’t offer to pay as much money as other social platforms did. Other social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc paid a “fair rate” to UMG to have rights to use certain music. TikTok didn’t like the idea of paying a high rate so UMG decided to remove all owned music.
Many TikTok users are upset with their videos being muted so they decided to delete all of their muted videos. TikTok user, Julia Dommel is one of the users upset about this deal with UMG. “Now that most of my videos are muted I want to delete them because without sound the videos just don’t look right if I’m lip syncing to nothing.
”Although TikTokers have the option to replace the sound with another available sound, there are not many options to choose from now.”
Music artists that users miss the most are artists like, Drake, Taylor Swift, Playboy Carti, Bad Bunny, etc. A lot of popular TikTok trends are now missing like the popular TikTok trend with the sound “It’s the First of the Month.” Melissa Martins says she is going to miss hearing this sound on her for you page every first of the month because it’s something she looks forward to.
Once in a while you can catch artists’ songs on your for you page but usually these songs are sped up or slowed down. Sped up and slowed down songs have not entirely been taken down but TikTok is on the hunt to try to remove as many as possible as they are still trying to follow the deal between UMG.
Sharing music on TikTok was a good way for artists to get their fame and more listeners attracted to their music. For lots of people they found songs to add to their playlist from TikTok which gave music artists tons of streams. Without these songs on TikTok now music artists should expect a massive decrease in streams which could possibly lead to UMG reconsidering their deal in the future. But the mystery will continue on…
