Why a TikTok Shutdown is Closer Than Ever

TikTok’s recent actions are pushing it closer to a potential shutdown, sparking controversy and concern across the globe. Discover the key reasons why the platform’s future is hanging in the balance.

by Bobby Owsinski via Music 3.0

As you well know, TikTok has been on fire for the last few years, especially when it comes to music promotion. In fact, the platform has been an obsession with some artists, managers and even record labels lately, even though the service is notorious for not paying its fair share of royalties to artists and songwriters. Now in the face of being shut down in the United States, instead of making nice to get people on its side, the service has chosen to go to war with artists in an effort to pay them even less than they are now.

Battling Indies

A few weeks ago, TikTok broke off negotiations with Merlin, the association of independent record labels, instead choosing to enter into negotiations separately with each label. There’s strength in numbers, and Merlin would have been able to cut a better deal for its members than each individual label by itself, so it’s a pretty blatant attempt to lower its royalty payouts.

How Views Work

Just to review how you get paid on TikTok, because it’s different from almost all other streaming services – you get paid on the number of people that use your song on their videos, not on the number of views that a video gets. 

In other words, even though a million people may watch your video, you only get credit for one, but if a million people make a video with your song, then it equals a million views.

Even then the payout is less than any other platform (yes, even less than YouTube) and the real hope for artists is that viewers will hear a snippet of their song on TikTok then check out the entire song on Spotify or another major music streamer.

The fact that TikTok doesn’t want to payout more in royalties isn’t anything new, but given that it’s facing legislation in the U.S. Congress that would ban it due to national security and teenage addiction concerns, the move doesn’t make much sense.

In fact, it’s actually made the situation worse. The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), Artist Rights Alliance (ARA), American Federation of Musicians (AFM), Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC), Music Artists Coalition (MAC), Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and Songwriters of North America (SONA) have all come out against the move and have asked Congress to pass legislation to protect their members.

State Lawsuits

It doesn’t stop there. More than a dozen states have filed suit against the platform claiming that it was designed specifically to addict kids, and the evidence presented by the Department of Justice is damning.

It looks likely that TikTok will be banned in the United States in 2025, unless something drastically changes after the election.

There will be many in the music business that will lament losing another platform for promotion, but we’ll all probably be better off without it.

Bobby Owsinski is a producer/engineer, author, blogger, podcaster, and coach. He has authored 24 books on music production, music, the music business, music AI, and social media.