Welcome to Music Business Worldwide’s weekly round-up – where we make sure you caught the five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days. MBW’s round-up is supported by Centtrip, which helps over 500 of the world’s best-selling artists maximize their income and reduce their touring costs.
If there was one overarching theme in music business news this week, it was… music disappearing.
Yesterday (March 14), we learned that, amid the ongoing licensing dispute between Universal Music Group (UMG) and TikTok, UMG has issued over 37,000 takedown requests to TikTok, resulting in 120 million videos being muted.
TikTok has already muted the audio on videos featuring UMG-licensed music, but its detection mechanism is being bypassed by ‘modified’ (sped up or otherwise changed) versions of UMG-owned tracks uploaded by users.
Also this week, we learned that streaming service Deezer has removed 26 million tracks from its platform in recent months. “The tracks that have been removed include noise, mono-track albums [albums made of copies of a single track], fake artists and tracks that haven’t been listened to in the past 12 months,” CEO Jeronimo Folgueira said.
If there was another dominant theme in music business news this week? It was… TikTok.
Besides the ongoing dispute with UMG, we learned this week that TikTok parent ByteDance‘s efforts to develop music AI go much further than what we’ve seen to date. Among other things, the company is developing a model called StemGen, which is “trained to listen to musical context and respond appropriately.”
Meanwhile, a bill to force ByteDance to divest TikTok in the US or face a ban of the platform in the country passed the House of Representatives this week. The bill’s progress through the legislative process has been running at breakneck speed.
Finally, in non-TikTok-related news, we got an update on the ongoing rivalry between Warner Music Group (WMG) and a consortium led by Believe CEO Denis Ladegaillerie over the acquisition of Believe. France’s securities authority has been called in to referee one important aspect of the process, while Believe’s board has rejected – for the time being – WMG’s request for confidential financial info on the company.
MBW has obtained evidence that, since February 1, Universal Music Group has hit TikTok with over 37,000 separate copyright takedown requests to remove different ‘Sounds’ from the platform.
These 37,000+ requests have resulted in – wait for it – approximately 120 million videos on the ByteDance platform being muted.
The majority of these takedowns, sources tell me, have targeted ‘modified’ versions of UMG-controlled music uploaded by TikTok users – i.e. sped up, slowed down, pitched up, or pitched down versions of original recordings.
Because the audio of these tracks is ‘modified’, they often bypass TikTok’s copyright detection filters – the same copyright detection filters that would automatically block users from uploading videos featuring un-modified Universal tracks…
France-headquartered streaming service Deezer’s soon-to-be-former CEO, Jeronimo Folgueira, has been raising the alarm for some time about low-quality content flooding music streaming services, degrading the user experience and diluting the money earned by legitimate artists.
“There’s a lot of content now getting uploaded to our platform every week, and that number keeps growing and growing and growing,” he said on an earnings call in March 2023.
“We want to give our customers a high-quality experience and relevant content, so obviously getting AI to flood our catalog is not something we’re super keen on, and we’re working on that.”
It turns out Deezer was indeed “working on that” – the company has confirmed that it has removed over 26 million tracks in the months since it first launched its Universal Music Group-approved artist-centric payment system (in September 2023)…
MBW has covered TikTok and parent company ByteDance‘s work in the field of AI music-making and machine learning extensively over the past few years.
In August 2022, MBW broke the news that TikTok and ByteDance were hiring several highly skilled specialists in machine learning and AI music creation in both the US and China. (They still are.)
That initial hiring spree followed its acquisition in July 2019 of Jukedeck, a UK-based AI Music startup specializing in creating royalty-free music.
ByteDance has also launched a machine-learning-driven music-making app called Mawf in the past couple of years, as well as Ripple – an AI-powered music-making app that can turn a hummed melody into a song.
More recently, TikTok has been testing an AI Song feature that uses a large language model to power lyric generation.
Now, MBW has unearthed two recent research papers that indicate ByteDance’s ambitions in the realm of AI-made music go much further than what we’ve seen to date…
A bill that would force China-based ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the US is one large step closer to becoming law, after passing through the House of Representatives.
The Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act passed 253 to 65 on the House floor on Wednesday (March 13), with one lawmaker voting “present.”
The vote came little more than a week after it was introduced by Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, and six days after it sailed through the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a unanimous (50-0) vote.
By the standards of the US Congress, that’s breakneck speed…
Right. Before we tell you the latest in the fast-unfurling soap opera of Believe, Warner Music Group, and Denis Ladegaillerie‘s consortium, it’s probably helpful to bring you up to speed.
Believe you me, MBW would love to just skip to the latest chapter: Believe’s board* calling in the AMF – France’s equivalent of the USA’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – to rule on whether one crucial move by Denis Ladegaillerie’s consortium gets the AOK, or the A-Oh-Nay.
But without the requisite context, trust us, this story will probably leave you lost at sea.
So before we get to the good stuff, here’s a quick chronological recap on what’s happened so far, based on a flurry of announcements issued by Believe and its board (and one by WMG) in recent weeks…
