Universal Music’s Fight With TikTok Is Screwing Indie Artists

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Grace Gardner is an independent musician. They own their own music; write, perform, and produce it largely by themself; and pay for mixing and mastering out of their own pocket, with money they earn from their work as a music educator in Philadelphia. So the folk singer was surprised to log on to TikTok just a few weeks before the release of their new EP and see their songs had disappeared, alongside thousands of others associated with Universal Music Group, the largest label conglomerate in music. “There was no road map forward,” Gardner says.

On February 1, UMG let its licensing deal with TikTok expire. In a letter specifically addressed to artists and songwriters, UMG cited a standstill in negotiations over payment, AI protections, and on-app safety. Some users hoped having fewer major-label stars like Drake, BTS, and Taylor Swift on the app would help smaller artists break through. But many of those independent artists had their music taken off TikTok, too, either because UMG distributes it or because the artists wrote it with a songwriter published by Universal Music Publishing Group.

Gardner isn’t on a UMG label. But in 2022, they signed a deal with Imperial, a company that describes itself as “Republic Records’ home for independent music.” Imperial would provide distribution for their releases — getting the music onto streaming and marketing it to playlists — while Gardner would still own the music and handle other aspects of their career like touring. “I had no idea what a good deal was supposed to look like,” says Gardner, whose low income from music recently forced her to apply for food stamps. “That was not the first one that had come in, it was the second or third, but it was the one that had the friendliest percentages on it.” They didn’t know at the time that, due to its connection with Republic, Imperial technically fell under Universal Music Group.

Gardner has a significantly bigger following on TikTok than any other app, and had been counting on promoting their EP, Recovery Mile, in the days ahead of its February 23 release. Exposure would be crucial to earning back their $10,000 advance. Instead, when UMG’s license expired, they had to rethink their marketing strategy on the fly, with little guidance from Imperial. (Imperial Music did not respond to a request for comment.) Now, Gardner is left wondering how their release would’ve been different if they could post on TikTok as they planned. “As the artist, I really wish that it had been put in front of more ears,” they say.

Groups such as the American Association of Independent Music, which represents indie labels, have praised UMG’s decision to leave the app. “We can only hope that UMG’s move serves as a catalyst for change, advocating for fairer compensation models that acknowledge the substantial contribution of music to the success of platforms while still leveraging these spaces for effective marketing and promotional activities,” said Richard James Burgess, the group’s president and CEO. But not all of the indie community is on board. The United Musicians and Allied Workers noted, “Both Universal and TikTok are making massive profits while artists are being paid fractions of pennies. Is this a competition to see who can underpay artists more?” Additional independent music could leave the platform in May, when the National Music Publishers’ Association’s TikTok license will expire. (And this is all playing out as a House bill considers banning TikTok in the U.S. entirely.)

Many independent artists assumed that, because UMG is a major-label conglomerate, their music would be safe. Instead, they were surprised to learn just how much of the industry connects back to UMG. “I literally remember seeing the headlines and being like, Oh, fuck. Thank God I was never signed to a UMG label,” says pop musician Ella Jane, 22. But she released two EPs on Fader Label, which is distributed by Virgin Music, which is also part of UMG — a fact she only realized when another TikToker had cited Jane as an example of a smaller artist affected by the takedowns.

Loveless, a pop-punk duo signed to Rise Records and distributed by BMG, were warned that some of their cover songs would go silent when Universal Music Publishing Group began pulling its songwriters’ music off TikTok on February 28. But the band was shocked to find a few of their original songs, including 2022’s “Killing Time,” were also taken down, because a co-writer, Kyle Black, is under UMPG. “His, whatever, 5 percent of that one song, they’ve decided, ‘Well, we own this master,’” said singer Julian Comeau, 27. “No, you don’t. That’s not how this works.” Rapper Hoodie Allen, who’s proudly never worked with a label and has independently charted two top-ten projects, found himself in a similar situation, as he explained in a TikTok captioned “how is this legal.”

For some indie musicians, the issues with TikTok began months before UMG’s deal expired. UMG claimed in its initial letter that TikTok tried to “intimidate” the company “by selectively removing the music of certain of our developing artists” during negotiations. Verskotzi, a rock musician signed to Preach Records, remembers having “a full-on panic attack” when he tried to post his new single “Normal Kid” on December 13, only to realize all his music released on Preach had been muted. Preach, like Fader, is distributed by Virgin under UMG. Verskotzi finally got the music back online days later, after Preach worked with their Virgin and UMG contacts. But he didn’t realize his songs may have been maliciously taken down until he read UMG’s February 1 letter. “That just pulled the rug out from under me in an emotional way,” says Verskotzi, 32. “To understand that vulnerable, developing artists were just part of TikTok’s bidding, essentially — that hurts.”

An industry source told Vulture that UMG believed its artists were targeted because TikTok specifically removed songs under Virgin — which generally handles UMG’s independent distribution — during separate periods in June, November, and December. However, TikTok contests that it didn’t single out artists to mute, and insists it was equally enforcing a new policy toward the end of UMG’s deal. “As we approached the expiration of our licensing deal, we ceased actively promoting or ingesting new tracks by any Universal Music Group artist,” a TikTok spokesperson told Vulture. “This policy was applied uniformly across all artists represented and it is factually inaccurate to claim individuals were specifically targeted.” UMG was not the first to accuse TikTok of taking down music as a negotiating tactic, though, after Sony releases experienced similar issues last September amid the company’s own ongoing talks with TikTok.

Verskotzi was one of at least three artists on Preach who experienced issues uploading new music in December. When Jay Cohen, the label’s CEO, later read UMG’s allegation that TikTok used his musicians and other developing artists as bargaining chips, he was “furious.” “There is no world where that is okay. Taylor Swift, Drake, the Weeknd — they don’t need TikTok for a song to perform well,” he says. “It’s not nearly as consequential to the success of [their] songs as it is for an upcoming artist who’s just trying to get that song in front of as many people as they possibly can.”

Used to functioning as one-person teams, some independent artists quickly found workarounds to keep promoting themselves on TikTok. Jane, for instance, made videos touting her “only independent release” that she could still play on the app — which, luckily, was her current single, “Dead Weight.” The swell of user support for indies after the UMG takedowns reminded her of the sense of community on TikTok early in the pandemic. “I was attracting a new audience in a way that I hadn’t before,” she says. “It was all these people who really want to support smaller artists. I hadn’t seen it in years. I had even seen just random kids posting, ‘Hey, can someone comment independent or small artists to support with all this UMG stuff?’”

Cohen, on the contrary, is glad to have built a label that’s not so reliant on TikTok. “Too many marketing agencies or digital-ad agencies have started labels, and that’s their entire focus,” he says. Instead, Verskotzi sees TikTok as “just another checklist on my marketing campaigns,” no different from another social-media platform. So when his music was once again muted on February 1, he felt free to stop focusing on TikTok, even with a new album, Shiring, out later that month. “The body of work that I just released is not meant for these seven-second moments,” he says. “It’s a true rock-and-roll album. I pressed it on vinyl. It’s not a TikTok album.”

UMG acknowledged “the challenges that TikTok’s actions will cause artists” in its letter but encouraged artists to focus on the long-term benefits of a better deal. In Comeau’s experience, though, the biggest thing TikTok can provide a small artist is the exposure he’s currently losing out on, which could lead to more fans streaming his band’s music and buying concert tickets. He’s now unable to post many of Loveless’s covers, which he was using to promote their current tour with Waterparks. “There’s no way hitting pause like this on thousands of artists’ careers is worth the damage that they’re doing to us,” he says. “Some of us will not be able to recover from this as easily as a billion-dollar corporation like UMG will. They made more in the last year than I’ll make probably in my entire lifetime. And for them to be like, ‘Well, it’s still not enough, we need to take from everybody until we get what we want,’ that just feels like greed.” He’s all for artists making more money off TikTok and shares UMG’s concerns over AI but doesn’t buy UMG as a pro-artist company.

Verskotzi struggles to see TikTok as pro-artist, either, even after his music was allegedly targeted. “I think ultimately, Universal is fighting the good fight in trying to set a precedent for the industry at large in terms of TikTok and how they don’t properly value music,” he says. “It’s clear that they don’t see it as something that deserves proper pay and for musicians to be able to make a living wage from their use of the music on the platform.”

Where many artists do agree is that TikTok’s role in the music industry needs to change. Yes, musicians want to get paid for songs that go viral, but they also want labels to invest more in promoting artists after they go viral, or if they don’t go viral at all. “What this really exposes is how many fuck ups there have been in the way the music industry has gone, and how many artists have been left stranded and made to feel like they are not worth working with,” Jane says. She’s hopeful that a bigger, artist-led movement like last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes can come from this, and that the moment can push labels to move away from focusing so much on algorithms and numbers. Gardner is already trying to make that happen in their own career by considering a fully DIY release for their next project, through the service DistroKid.

Comeau worries, though, about what happens if this forces TikTok to focus less on music entirely. He knows the company is “greedy” like UMG, and has the money to give in on a new deal. But he can’t bring himself to stand with UMG. “TikTok has done a lot more for my career than UMG ever has,” Comeau says. Just the other day, he asked a crowd in Denver if they heard of Loveless through TikTok, and half the room cheered. “Until I actually see a tangible thing that UMG is fighting for artists, all I’m seeing is, ‘Boo-hoo, we want more money,’ and that, to me, is not a good enough reason.”