Who’s Getting Hurt in the Universal Music-TikTok Standoff? Artists and Songwriters (Guest Column)
variety.comAri Herstand By now, it’s widely known that Universal Music Group has removed most or all of its catalog from TikTok, as well as apparently every song that includes at least one songwriter affiliated Universal Music Publishing Group.
It’s a battle that pits the world’s largest music company against the most influential and powerful platform for promoting music — which for the past five years has been TikTok.
Universal claims these actions are “to help our artists and songwriters attain their greatest creative and commercial potential,” it wrote in an open letter last week.
However, for many of those artists and songwriters, the move is actually having the opposite effect: What has been overlooked in the war of words between both UMG and TikTok is the very real impact on the human beings who make the music.
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