Music on TikTok is disappearing amid battle with Universal Music Group. Can it make photos work?
After Universal Music Group pulled music from TikTok, and will likely remove more, the app seems to be emphasizing photo slideshows instead.
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- TikTok is losing access to Universal Music Group's songs, including from artists like Taylor Swift.
- Now, TikTok is encouraging creators to post more photo content.
- It's a reminder that platforms can push and pull users to make certain kinds of content using carrots and sticks.
TikTok, the platform best known as "the app where people dance around to music," is losing a lot of music and is going to lose more.
But it may have a backup plan: Photos!
From The Wall Street Journal, in a comprehensive piece about the escalating standoff between TikTok and Universal Music Group, the world's biggest record label:
Since Universal's music was taken down, TikTok has encouraged creators to post more photo content by suggesting they will get more likes and comments if they do. "Photo posts get 1.9x more likes and 2.9x more comments on average than videos," said one notification sent to creators Feb. 12 and viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal's story comes as the fight between UMG and TikTok is widening: Earlier this month, Universal required TikTok to take down songs it owns from the app, which means some of the most popular artists in the world, like Taylor Swift, Drake, and Bad Bunny started to go silent.
Now the fight is spreading to Universal's music publishing catalog, which means songs by artists who record for other labels but are written — even in part — by Universal's songwriters can disappear as well.
The bans apply to both videos posted by the artists themselves, as well as a much larger pool of user-generated videos that use music in the background.
It's a fight that could last for some time. So TikTok appears to be not-subtly telling creators they ought to spend more time making photo slideshows and less time worrying about videos.
It's not a new suggestion — TikTok was apparently pushing slideshows back in December — but it takes on additional resonance now.
A couple thoughts about this:
This is a reminder that TikTok, like all big platforms, can push and pull users to make certain kinds of content using different carrots and sticks. See: horizontal videos and shopping videos. So, if it really wants to encourage more photo slideshows, it can definitely do that.
I've seen quite a few photo posts recently, though I have no idea if they've spiked in popularity. But I also know that many of those posts also have music. So I wonder if they'll be less interesting to creators if they can't use the music they want as a score behind them.
While stories like the one you're reading now focus on the fact that TikTok is losing access to music from some of the most famous people in the world, I am curious to know how crucial that music really is to TikTok users. Because in my TikTok experience, you often hear a lot of music that isn't from big artists and, in fact, comes from artists users likely can't identify and are using just because they've encountered it via an inexplicable TikTok meme. Like this song, from an indie band called The King Khan & BBQ Show, which came out in 2004 and then randomly went viral on TikTok in 2022. It presumably won't be affected by the UMG fight:
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