Financial News Agency, January 31 (Editor Liu Rui) On Tuesday, Eastern Time, Universal Music Group warned that it would remove its own songs from the social media giant TikTok due to failure to reach an agreement on a new licensing contract. .
What is somewhat surprising is that Universal Music claimed that the reason why the company chose to part ways with TikTok, in addition to the failure to agree on the contract renewal price, also included the differences in attitudes between the two parties towards artificial intelligence.
Universal Music breaks up with TikTok?
Late on Tuesday local time, Universal Music Group released an open letter to artists and songwriters. Universal Music claimed in the letter that it "will stop licensing content to TikTok and TikTok Music Services" after the current contract expires on Wednesday.
Universal Music previously reached a licensing agreement with tiktok in February 2021, and the agreement will expire in February this year.
Universal Music accused TikTok of "trying to build a music-based business without paying a reasonable price for music."
Universal Music emphasized that its analysis found that "most of the content on TikTok" contains music, compared with Other social networks have more. TikTok only accounts for 1% of Universal Music’s revenue.
Universal Music accused: "tiktok is trying to coerce us into accepting a deal that is worth less than the previous deal, far less than fair market value, and does not reflect their exponential growth (usage). "
tiktok in "It is sad and disappointing that Universal Music Group has put its own greed ahead of the interests of its artists and songwriters," the response said in a statement late Tuesday, claiming Universal Music "has chosen to leave a company with more than 1 billion users." Strong support from the platform, which is a free promotion and discovery tool for their talents."
Abuse of artificial intelligence raises concerns
Universal Music stated in the letter that its differences with TikTok mainly focus on 's compensation for artists and the protection of human beings Artists are protected from the "harmful effects" of artificial intelligence and tiktok users' online safety are three key issues.
Universal Music said: "Tiktok proposes to pay our artists and songwriters a fraction of the compensation fees that other similar social platforms pay."
Universal Music also said in the statement:
"In terms of artificial intelligence, TikTok allows ’s move is tantamount to flooding the platform with AI-generated recordings while developing tools to support, promote and encourage AI music creation on the platform, and then demanding a contractual right to allow that content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists. Yu Zai supports the use of artificial intelligence to replace artists ."
Universal Music also complained:
"Tiktok has made little effort to deal with the large amount of content on its platform that infringes on our artists' music, and has not provided meaningful solutions to address the growing number of Content adjacency issues, not to mention the wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying, and harassment on the platform. The only feasible way for to remove infringing or questionable content (such as pornographic deepfakes of artists) is through extremely cumbersome and low-level An efficient program, which is equivalent to a digital version of the game "Whac-a-Mole".
Universal Music is one of the world's largest music companies, and its artists include superstars Taylor Swift and "A-girl" Ariana Grande. , Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber, Adele, Elton John and Bob Dylan, etc.
