UMG Says TikTok Is Not a ‘Material Part’ of Global Music Promotion

Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge addressed the company’s ongoing licensing dispute with TikTok in its latest earnings call on Wednesday (Feb. 28), saying: “there must not be free rides for massive global platforms such as TikTok that refuse to meaningfully address issues around AI platform safety or pay their fair share for our artists’ and songwriters’ work.”

Boyd Muir, UMG’s CFO and executive vp, also revealed during the earnings call that UMG would “focus on accelerating [its] partnerships” with Meta, Snap, YouTube and more competing social platforms and that it would make more announcements about this “in the coming weeks.”

At the end of January, UMG, the world’s largest music company, opted to let its licensing agreement with TikTok expire, citing that the short-form video app refused to pay the “fair value” for music. It also cited other concerns around artificial intelligence. “TikTok proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay,” UMG wrote in a letter to its artists. Within hours, TikTok fired back at UMG in reply, saying that the major music company “has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”

Since then, the companies’ negotiations have been seemingly stuck at a standstill and millions of UMG-controlled recordings have been removed from the platform. Starting Tuesday (Feb. 27), the takedowns went even further, including the removal of any recording that features one or more Universal Music Publishing Group-signed songwriters for the first time. This impacts such major recording artists as Beyoncé, Harry Styles and Bad Bunny, even though they don’t record for UMG.

In response to the publishing takedowns, TikTok said in a statement on Wednesday, “[UMG’s] actions not only affect the songwriters and artists that they represent, but now also impact many artists and songwriters not signed to Universal. We remain committed to reaching an equitable agreement with Universal Music Group.”

UMG’s earnings call on Wednesday focused largely on TikTok during the the question and answer portion, as well as other core development for the company like its new deal with Chord Music Partners.

While UMG has previously said TikTok only makes up about 1% of the company’s total revenue, chief digital officer and executive vp Michael Nash said he believes that’s not necessarily all a loss amid the negotiation standoff. “In general, if consumption shifts from TikTok to other short video platforms like Reels or YouTube Shorts, we believe we can, in fact, recapture some lost revenue,” he said during the call. “Keep in mind, over half of TikTok monthly active users already also use other short video services. In some markets, that percentage is as high as 70%. These are services that monetize engagement at a much higher rate, so revenue positive consumer migration is easily foreseeable.”

Nash also said that UMG has been “providing notices to effectuate the muting of million of videos every day for the last two weeks” on TikTok to aid in the takedown process, which started earlier this month. “And that’s the recorded music content. Keep in mind that our publishing copyrights are just now starting to be enforced on the platform.” He noted that the company has seen “no discernible negative impact” on its “broader digital business” by leaving TikTok to date but added that “that’s qualified by the fact that we’re very early on in the process… In fact, we’ve seen a slight uptick in terms of frontline consumption and catalog consumption over this short period of time.”

In response to one question about TikTok, Grainge responded, “I’m also not prepared to compromise the future of social category by doing something that completely undermines the economics for us and for everybody else.” One of UMG’s key concerns among the licensing discussions has been that if it were to accept a diminished royalty from TikTok, then other social media platforms could request the same.

But Grainge vowed that UMG likes “to be friendly.” He said, “We are friendly. My phone is open, unfortunately, 24 hours a day. We hope that we can find a solution… we like win-win situations. We’ve laid out what’s important to us, and I believe important to our industry.”

When an investor asked if this remark indicated that UMG was waiting for TikTok to call them and “reengage on a deal structure [UMG has] previously presented,” Nash said “we’re not going to comment on the status of discussions with TikTok for obvious reasons.”

At the end of the call, Grainge downplayed TikTok’s impact on music marketing: “I mean, let’s put this into perspective,” he said. “Apple, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube, all the social categories, the fitness categories, digital radio, Sirius, Pandora, iHeart… [TikTok is] one, it’s not a material part of the multidisciplinary jigsaw, where we promote and market our music globally”