Arts & Entertainment

Universal Music’s Fight With TikTok Is Screwing Indie Artists

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On February 1, Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record label conglomerate, let its deal with TikTok expire over insufficient royalty payments, among other issues. That not only meant songs by the likes of Taylor Swift, Drake, and BTS were no longer available to post on the app, but already-existing videos featuring those songs would also go mute. No sane person would argue against higher royalty payments for musicians at a time when they’re only receiving fractions of a cent. Yet that’s little comfort to independent artists like Julian Comeau, who was surprised to learn that his band’s music, alongside that of UMG’s biggest names, had disappeared too. So what gives? According to Vulture’s Justin Curto, many indie artists’ indie labels had distribution deals in place with UMG subsidiaries, thus forcing those songs off the app too. That leaves someone like Comeau, the 27-year-old singer of pop-punk duo Loveless, without one of the industry’s most important tools to share his music — at least not until a new deal is reached. As he told Justin, “Some of us will not be able to recover from this as easily as a billion-dollar corporation like UMG will. They made more in the last year than I’ll make probably in my entire lifetime.”

—Alex Suskind, senior editor, Vulture

Universal Music’s Fight With TikTok Is Screwing Indie Artists  “Some of us will not be able to recover from this.”
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