If you haven’t seen, UMG has pulled their music catalog from TikTok, and shit is hitting the fan.
This is from Bloomberg’s ‘Soundbite‘ newsletter, from UMG country artist Cody Fry:
“I feel like I’m a person standing between two colliding planets,” he added. “It’s just hard — as a hard-working artist — to see a budding, viral trend with one of your songs that’s really awesome, in its infancy, just, like, get crushed by multi-billion dollar corporations.”
It sure sucks to be at the mercy of mega-corps who own the rights to your music, but… this is the way it is.
This is what we signed up for: letting massive apps be the arbiters of taste and culture by way of AI algorithms, with content created for free by users using music licensed from giant label catalogs.
What could go wrong?