Today’s big news: Universal Music Group and TikTok, by way of a joint announcement, have confirmed that they have struck a new licensing deal – three months after UMG pulled its recordings catalog from the service.
What does this new deal mean for UMG and its artists and songwriters? Standout headline: More money.
That fact was confirmed and expanded upon in an internal memo from UMG Chairman/CEO, Sir Lucian Grainge, issued to Universal employees this morning (May 2) and obtained by MBW.
Reminder: according to Universal, TikTok’s royalty payouts to UMG prior to this new deal constituted just 1% of UMG’s total revenues.
Grainge writes in today’s memo: “Under the new agreement, artist and songwriter compensation will be greater than under our prior TikTok deal, and the total value UMG’s artists and songwriters garner from this partnership will be more closely aligned with other platforms in the social music category.
“Further, TikTok will implement tools and processes to help address provenance and attribution issues, helping artists and songwriters to more effectively monetize their work.”
The latter part of that statement (on “provenance and attribution issues”) is likely a reference to the so-called “modified audio” that is rife on TikTok.
Monitoring platform Pex has estimated that over 38% of music on TikTok is ‘modified’ – i.e. a sped-up, slowed-down, or otherwise altered version of a previously-existing copyright.
MBW discovered in March that, despite UMG’s official catalog being removed from TikTok, ‘modified’ versions of UMG recordings remained available across the ByteDance platform – uploaded to the service, often without the name of the original artist present, by TikTok users.
Meanwhile, when Grainge talks about pushing TikTok’s payouts closer to “other platforms in the social media category”, he’s probably referring to one company more than any other: Meta.
The Instagram and Facebook owner struck a deal with UMG in 2017 that Grainge now refers to as “the first-ever deal to monetize what had yet to be monetized—the use of music on social platforms”.
Meta and UMG have since built on that agreement with further deals, including a pact inked in 2022 that UMG said at the time “deepens our partnership” while creating “new opportunities around revenue-sharing”.
Discussing music rightsholders’ general relationship with social media platforms in recent years, Grainge says in today’s memo:…
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