AI Fight Complicates TikTok, Universal Music Licensing Standoff

Artificial intelligence is a driving force behind the most public fallout between music and social media behemoths in at least a decade as the industries wrestle over the proliferation of AI-generated music recordings.

Universal Music Group and TikTok Inc. continued their standoff last week over the short-form video platform’s access to the music label’s extensive catalog after their licensing deal expired Jan. 31. In a letter published by Universal a day before their pact lapsed, the record label said TikTok is “allowing the platform to be flooded with AI-generated recordings” while demanding contractual rights that could “massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists.”

Agreeing to those terms would be “nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI,” wrote Universal. The record label banned TikTok users from using its artists’ music on the platform, including songs by The Beatles, Taylor Swift, and Bad Bunny.

Though the relationship is beneficial to both parties—TikTok promotes Universal’s music that’s essential to users’ posts on the platform—differences over the use of AI-generated recordings has the potential to draw out the stalemate. This fight mirrors conflicts over AI spanning creative industries. News publishers, novelists and artists are in court against the top AI companies over infringement. Meantime, musicians and actors warn that the surge in deepfakes jeopardize their creations.

Universal may want to set precedent on how platforms treat AI-generated content since it currently sees the technology as being bad for business, “which could change the duration and the intensity of the negotiations,” Georgetown Law Professor Kristelia García said.

For their part, Sony and Warner could be waiting to see how the new dispute plays out. “When Universal takes the lead they’ll follow. That’s also happened before,” said García.

The escalation of AI isn’t the only difference since the last big dispute between a label and a social media platform, when Warner Music Group pulled its music off YouTube for nine months in 2008 after the companies couldn’t agree to licensing terms. “The industry as a whole recognizes now better than they did back then how much they depend on these platforms to drive the actual revenue streams that they care about,” said Joseph Fishman, a professor at Vanderbilt University Law School.

García said it’s hard to say which party has more leverage, but Universal has the popularity of its artists on its side.

“They’ve got Taylor Swift for God’s sake,” she said. “How can TikTok continue to attract users to this platform if all the songs that the users want to use are muted?”

Dilution and Profits

TikTok’s adoption of AI-generated music could decrease its reliance on Universal’s catalog on the platform, and enable the platform to spend less on licensing. Universal’s social media revenue, along with songwriters’ and recording artists’, depends on how much of TikTok’s user base is utilizing its work.

“Because you’ve got all of this AI-generated stuff kind of filling up a lot of people’s time and space, it’s going to diminish the the amount of money that these artists and songwriters get,” University of Washington School of Law professor Peter Nicolas said.

Fishman agreed. “As long as TikTok doesn’t need to pay or needs to pay less for them, then TikTok has an incentive to push the use of these AI recordings rather than the copyrighted and label-licensed recordings,” he said.

Universal’s public acknowledgment is a signal of how important the issue is to the group—while stalemates in these negotiations are common, they usually happen privately, said García, who previously worked at Universal. “It is distinct from the behind-the-scenes sort of disagreements because of its public nature, including that Universal actually issued a public statement, which is kind of unusual.”

The move is “part of the respective PR campaigns to say, ‘Poor Universal and its artists are being shafted by this big bad social media company,’ and TikTok’s PR campaign to say, ‘Poor little social media upstart getting bullied around again by the major labels,’” she said. “They’re both kind of getting their machinery ready to say that there’s this problem,” when really they’ll come to an agreement at some point, as labels did in previous deals with Spotify and YouTube.

Artists’ Reactions

Singer-songwriter Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” exploded on TikTok in 2020 and has remained popular on the platform since. But Kahan is signed to a Universal label, which means his songs likely won’t be on the platform until the two sides reach an agreement. “I won’t be able to promote my music on TikTok anymore,” Kahan said in a TikTok video on Feb. 1. “But luckily I’m not a TikTok artist, right?” he asked while widening his eyes to viewers.

Yungblud, an English singer-songwriter, commented on the fallout in a TikTok video posted Feb. 1. “Two massive companies deciding what goes on with people’s art,” he said, calling the dynamic “daft” in an explitive-riddled rant. He also noted a potential upside. “It’s gonna be cool what might come, when people like could just focus on pure expression,” instead of the algorithm behind the computer-laden art.

Even before the TikTok and Universal dispute, artists have expressed mixed feelings about AI’s capabilities. Billie Eilish said the technology is “impressive” but “scary” during a 2023 appearance on The Late, Late Show with James Corden. The artist known as Grimes endorsed the technology and told users on X, formerly Twitter, she would gladly split profits if any songs using her stylings were successful.

“Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings,” Grimes said.

Though creators might have mixed feelings about songs being pulled, groups representing songwriters have supported their fight for higher compensation and guardrails on AI.

“Music is a driving force behind TikTok’s success and it is extremely unfortunate that TikTok does not seem to value the music creators that fuel its business,” National Music Publishers’ Association President and CEO David Israelite said in a statement. Many independent music publishers’ TikTok licenses are also set to lapse in April, Israelite said in a speech during Grammy week, according to a Billboard report.

“We believe artificial intelligence should never be used to dilute the value of human creativity,” he added. “We have seen other social media platforms make the mistake of claiming promotion should substitute for fair compensation. It’s a losing argument and it is wrong.”

The tie between songwriting groups and labels like Universal is somewhat of a love-hate relationship, said Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America. “We love them when they’re putting out the music and fighting for the payments; we hate it when they get the music, get the monies and kind of go, ‘You know, we’re gonna sit on this until you figure out a way to wrestle it out of us.’”

He added, “You can’t eat fame, and fame will not pay your house note.”

Enforcement Balancing Act

Legal concerns for both TikTok and its users could arise too if consumers try to fill the void of the now-pulled songs by creating sound-alike versions, professors said. If Universal owns the publishing rights to a song—the words and composition, not just the recording rights associated with a specific artist’s rendition—users could be barred from even posting covers of themselves singing those tracks.

To try and keep its content off the platform, Universal could send TikTok takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

If TikTok receives a notice from Universal it’s required to remove the infringing content in a timely fashion. But that tactic may not be the most efficient enforcement tool, García said. Takedown notices are “time consuming and they also take a lot of time to place them and then time for this content to come down. And they’re a bit of whack-a-mole because the content can just go right back up,” she said.

While Nicolas, the University of Washington law professor, said he believes rightsholders are going to be watching what’s on the platform, enforcement is “a tough balance because the people who own the rights in a lot of these works also don’t want to look like jerks in going after an individual user.”

Popular artists speaking out could result in a swift end of the standoff, Carnes said, pointing to Taylor Swift’s negotiating heft when she pulled her music from Spotify in 2014.

“If you had five major major artists join hands and say to their fans, ‘Hey, guys, this is not fair,’ then Tiktok would collapse,” he said. “They would say, ‘Okay, yeah, you know, we got to pay something for this.’”