End of the standoff and return to normal. Drake, Rihanna, The Weeknd and Bob Dylan, the star artists of Universal Music Group (UMG), the world number one in music, will make their big return to the Chinese social network TikTok within one to two weeks. The two groups – UMG and TikTok − announced, Thursday May 2, the signing of a licensing agreement “multidimensional”.
According to their joint press release, this agreement “marks a new era of strategic collaboration”, who aims “to help UMG artists and songwriters realize their creative and commercial potential”. Exploitation of capacities “technological, marketing and promotional of TikTok” must allow UMG to “offer improved remuneration to songwriters and artists”, “new promotion and engagement opportunities for their recordings and songs” and especially, “state-of-the-art artificial intelligence protections (AI) generative ».
Concretely, TikTok is committed to strengthening online security protections and developing specific tools for artists, such as integrated ticketing or global access to data and analytics on their audiences − to better understand their global fan bases .
Strong method
The agreement in the field of generative artificial intelligence was all the more expected as the use of fake voices of famous artists becomes commonplace. According to Bloomberg, a search on TikTok for videos “Taylor Swift AI” shows several videos featuring AI-generated songs with the artist’s voice. Even though their provenance is specified, most of these examples have accumulated hundreds of thousands of views. This time, the Chinese platform pledges to work with UMG to remove unauthorized AI-generated music, and develop tools to improve artist and songwriter attribution .
Relations between the two groups had become abrasive. After months of bitter and futile negotiations which made no progress on artists’ remuneration, users’ online security, or obtaining guarantees in terms of artificial intelligence, the CEO of UMG Sir Lucian Grainge had resolved to adopt the strong method. At the end of January, he imposed a massive withdrawal of the songs of numerous artists from his catalog on TikTok and, in an open letter, accused the platform of“trying to build a business based on music, without paying fair value for the music”.
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