World’s Biggest Music Company Deploys the ‘Nuclear Option’ Against TikTok
Gwen Stefani wanted her new song to have its day. The No Doubt frontwoman and star solo artist planned to release a duet with husband Blake Shelton earlier this month and promote it with a pre-Super Bowl performance. A week before the release of “Purple Irises," however, her label’s parent company, Universal Music Group, took the unusual step of pulling all of its artists’ songs off TikTok after reaching a stalemate in contract negotiations with the social-media platform.
The move meant that Stefani’s song couldn’t be released on TikTok and short videos promoting it on the app—a ritual that has become a core element of marketing new music releases—were a no-go. Stefani and her team decided to pivot: Shelton’s country label, Warner Music Nashville, distributed the song instead of Universal’s Interscope Records. “Purple Irises" has since racked up millions of views on several TikTok videos Stefani and Shelton made featuring the tune.
The companies are battling over how much TikTok pays Universal—the world’s largest music company—to make the label’s vast catalog of songs available to one billion-plus social-media users worldwide, who are eager to splice snippets of that music into their dance videos, tutorials and memes. They are negotiating in a new world in which a seconds-long clip of a song on TikTok can be just as valuable as the tune in its entirety. The fight escalated this week, with Universal bringing on what many in the industry call “the nuclear option"—requiring TikTok to take down songs on which any songwriter signed to Universal’s publishing division has a credit.
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