[TICK]Tok: The Bloodsuckers of the Music Industry

In the way I see it, TikTok is the application software from Hell. 

Yes, TikTok has some very significant benefits for up and coming musicians that I will discuss in this article, but at some point, we have to ask ourselves the important questions. Is TikTok turning our generation into the technological equivalent of a local crackhead? Who is the source of all these viral sounds, and what happened to the people that created them?

For those who are unaware of the ethical standings of TikTok – or are still trying to grasp exactly what this “TikTok” is – it is a Chinese-owned social network that gives ordinary people an outlet to create 15-second homemade videos and share them with the public. What these ordinary people don’t know is that they could be partaking in inaccurate authorship when they are posting their lip-syncing videos online without giving credit to the artist. Of course, TikTok is well aware of these discrepancies regarding their blatant violation of intellectual property and lack of royalties – which is why they have a lawsuit on their hands. Whether this plagiarism is accidental or intentional, someone is bound to pay, and it will most likely be the musicians. 

After spending hours scrolling through the various attractions of TikTok myself, I can testify to the app’s parasitic nature. The relationship between the user and the supplier is quite simple: the user feeds the supplier a mouthful of creative content, and the supplier spits out this content to whoever is unfortunate enough to have downloaded the app. The user produces creative content with the expectations of recognition – in other words, a substantial amount of clout in return – but instead, their labor is labeled as anonymous. Or even worse, a lip-syncer takes the credit. Introduced to legislation in 2018, Title III of the Music Modernization Act allows for music producers and singer-songwriters to collect royalties for plays of sound recordings on streaming apps. The phrase “streaming apps” includes brands such as Apple Music, Spotify, and Pandora; however, TikTok is technically not a streaming app. By taking advantage of this loophole in copyright law, TikTok’s creators have grown to be one of the most wealthy app developers worldwide, swimming in well over 75 billion dollars. 

When a sound does go viral, the video labeled “original” at the top of the list isn’t necessarily the origin of a trend. By ordering the videos according to which one has the most likes, TikTok is demonstrating that they value popularity over originality. In some cases, the source of the original sound isn’t even listed. TikTok is blurring the lines of what exactly qualifies as plagiarism by enabling its users to upload original songs overlapped with their own audio. With recordings of voicemails and clips from TV shows being cut up and transformed into songs, TikTok is not only borrowing voices without permission but also contributing to the normalization of musical appropriation. 

So is TikTok devaluing the work of musicians, launching their career, or both? Although TikTok isn’t paying musicians anywhere close to the amount that they should be earning, maybe it is the idea of popularity that matters most to new artists. Being an artist myself, I find it perfectly satisfying to write this article with the knowledge that my satisfaction will be my only means of payment. Either way, these viral videos are discovering new artists at an accelerated rate and propelling women of color in the music industry, such as Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat. TikTok dances are functioning as trademarks to popular songs such as “Savage” from Megan Thee Stallion’s album Suga and “Say So” from Doja Cat’s album Hot Pink. Due to a TikTok dance created by a seemingly average, fourteen-or-fifteen-year-old-looking girl, “Say So” is now No. 1 on the Billboard charts. 

No matter how many new artists TikTok discovers and no matter how much money TikTok developers earn, the people behind TikTok will always be cheap. The reality of the matter is this: TikTok is hiding behind their bare-bones intellectual property policy.