Universal Music Group and TikTok deal secures artists’ royalties and AI protection

At Universal Music Group and TikTok I signed an agreement This 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 reveal financial terms or even how long the agreement would last (the wording was “multi-year”), but it appears the companies have permanently put their equity behind them. Dust from 2024 This at one point prompted UMG to pull its music from TikTok for three months.

The new agreement builds on the partnership it began with TikTok in 2024 and includes “expanded marketing and advertising campaigns, as well as access to e-commerce and other artist-focused tools,” UMG said in its announcement. Presumably, this means that UMG artists will have additional features available to sell merchandise, promote their concert tours or drop albums on TikTok.

The agreement also includes provisions to provide artists with “AI protections that enhance human artistry and ensure platform economics flow effectively to artists and songwriters,” UMG said. TikTok and UMG will work to remove “unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform,” and there will be improvements to artist and songwriter attribution, according to the companies.

Other recent UMG deals related to artificial intelligence

UMG and TikTok’s announcement comes shortly after it entered into a separate agreement with Spotify This seems to be going the other way with regard to artificial intelligence: It will allow fans to create remixes and cover songs of UMG’s music using AI tools.

Spotify will not be part of the service by default: subscribers will have to pay extra, even if they are Spotify Premium subscribers, to use these features. There’s no release date yet for Spotify’s new AI tool to create those covers or remixes.

UMG has signed other AI deals With Nvidia, sticky And music generator company Share During the past year.