TikTok, of course, has numerous people from the music world on staff: Ole Obermann, global head of music, and Tracy Gardner, head of licensing and partnerships, are former Warner Music Group executives. “It just doesn’t resonate with them.” Negotiating Tool?
“I don’t think they truly understand music at these tech companies,” says a record-label executive. Sometimes, as history has shown with most of those other companies, too, a different mindset puts them at odds with creative industries. Much like these other companies, TikTok is led by engineers who want to take data-driven approaches to making decisions on how much time and resources should be invested in projects, building systems and, yes, even licensing rights. Australia, an important yet small and isolated English-speaking market, is a popular place for tech companies - Spotify, Facebook, Google, Tinder and others - to test new products. One explanation is that TikTok is doing what tech companies do all the time: run tests, collect data and analyze the results. TikTok Banned From EU Commission Phones Over CybersecurityĪround the music industry, there are different interpretations for TikTok’s actions. The source said it is predictable that TikTok would gather this information ahead of high-stakes negotiations, like those ongoing with major labels and other stakeholders. Nonetheless, the company is gathering the data during a year when most, if not all, of TikTok’s agreements with music rights owners come up for renewal. It is not a negotiating tactic, the person said. Why would TikTok degrade its user experience even in a relatively small market like Australia? A source familiar with the company’s thinking said TikTok is using the experiment to study what is trending, how users are accessing the platform through different entry points and how they are enjoying it. “This change will not be in place for long, and not all music is affected.” The test will run from a month to a month and a half, according to a source familiar with the situation, meaning it should conclude by mid-March. “We appreciate it’s disappointing if a certain track is unavailable or if a sound is muted on a previous video,” the company said in a statement. The risk of upsetting users and creators isn’t lost on TikTok. Another echoed the sentiment: “wtf is up with tiktok removing like half the sounds? like i swear ive seen SO many tiktoks where the sound has been removed.” “Tiktok really ruining its own app with all this ‘sound removed’ garbage,” one Australian user tweeted last week.
The results may inform TikTok’s licensing strategy, but evidence that some Australians are unhappy members of the test cohort can be seen on Twitter.
This allows TikTok to compare and measure the different ways people interact with the app. Some people in test cohorts will encounter muted music on other users’ videos. Likewise, users in the test cohorts have different encounters with audio. The test puts people into multiple cohorts and provides them with different libraries of sounds to use in video creation, so not everybody in the test will have the same catalog to choose from. The test affects fewer than half of Australia-based accounts, and it doesn’t affect everyone in the same way, according to a person familiar with the situation. TikTok Has Gen Z Hooked - Can Its Streaming Service Get Them to Pay for Music?Įarlier this month, it was revealed that TikTok is running tests in Australia that limits the amount of licensed music some users can encounter on the platform.
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