GoKawiilUniversal Music Group and TikTok have signed an agreement that will keep artists including Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Sabrina Carpenter and Noah Kahan playing on the platform for years to come.
The announcement didn't disclose financial terms or even how long the agreement will last ("multi-year" was the phrasing), but it appears the companies have permanently put behind them a royalties dust-up from 2024 that at one point prompted UMG to pull its music from TikTok for three months.
UMG said in its announcement that the new agreement builds on a partnership it began with TikTok in 2024 and incorporates "expanded marketing and advertising campaigns, as well as access to e-commerce and other artist-centric tools." Presumably, this means UMG artists will have additional features available to sell merchandise and promote their music tours or album drops on TikTok.
The agreement, UMG said, also includes provisions to provide artists with "AI protections that promote human artistry and ensure platform economics effectively flow through to artists and songwriters." TikTok and UMG will work to remove "unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform," and there will be improvements to artist and songwriter attributions, according to the companies.
UMG's other recent AI-related deals
TikTok creators saw messages like this in 2024 if they had used music from Universal Music Group artists durign a royalties dispute between the companies. Screenshot by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper/CNET
UMG and TikTok's announcement comes shortly after a separate agreement with Spotify that seems to go the other way on AI: It will allow fans to create remixes and cover songs of UMG music using artificial intelligence tools.
The Spotify feature won't be part of the service by default: Subscribers will have to pay extra, even if they're on Spotify Premium, to use those features. There's no launch date yet for the new Spotify AI tool to create those covers or remixes.
UMG has signed other AI deals with Nvidia, Splice and music-generator company Udio over the last year.