Who will blink first in TikTok and UMG’s Mexican standoff?

There’s a huge variety of content on TikTok, but the social network has become synonymous with videos of people (mainly young women and girls) lip-synching and dancing to their favorite artists (mainly Taylor Swift).

But in February, the world’s largest record label, Universal Music Group (UMG), took the decision, after many attempts to negotiate with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to take away all of its music from it. The result was immediate: hundreds of thousands of videos using UMG-licensed music went silent, and as those of us who regularly make presentations know, a video without sound can be, well, devastatingly silent. Suddenly, no Taylor Swift, Drake, Bad Bunny or countless other artists were heard on TikTok anymore.

The label explained the reasons for its decision in what seemed like a bid to force ByteDance’s hand and get it to sit down and talk… but it’s been a month now, and what’s happened? Tune in to TikTok and you’ll find videos of users making their own music, acting out clips from movies, telling jokes, and a range of other home recordings. It would appear that TikTok users can get along fine without UMG.

Of course, there is no shortage of people trying to fill the void left by the many, many artists represented by UMG: from rival Columbia/Sony to indie labels and non-represented musicians, but apparently what’s working best now is simply filling the background of videos with stuff you can make yourself at home. All this coincides, moreover, with the arrival of DIY music created by generative algorithms like Suno, which allow you to simply describe a theme and style, or even write some specific lyrics and get a two-minute piece of music; more than enough for a TikTok clip.

The received wisdom until now was that success in the music business was measured in large part by how many of an artist’s songs were being used as viral memes on TikTok, but now TikTok continues to work as usual without the need to access the hundreds of thousands of artists represented by UMG, and also, thanks to the new tools, we may even find user-generated songs going viral on that network and rivaling the hits of UMG artists — whose music is probably being sourced by the algorithm that is creating them.

What next for TikTok? There has been talk that the company might create a music app to rival Spotify or Apple Music, or that it might set up its own record label. Could UMG, in a fit of pragmatism decide to sign an artist that has emerged from TikTok, or that a song created on TikTok starts generating royalties to ByteDance for its use on other channels? Or maybe a UMG artist might decide to switch to another label so as to get their music played on TikTok?

Now the question is who will blink first in ByteDance’s Mexican standoff with UMG?

(En español, aquí)