Taylor Swift’s songs have returned to TikTok months after announcing a licensing dispute between the platform and Universal Music Group (UMG) and ahead of her highly anticipated album release. Her deal with TikTok, which went against UMG’s wishes, proves that Swift doesn’t need labels. What she does need are fans.
Although Swift has been part of UMG’s publishing division since 2018, she appears to have signed a separate deal with TikTok, presumably because she owns her masters, meaning she has full creative control over her music. According to the Wall Street Journal, Swift’s team then presented plans to promote The department of tortured poets on TikTok this was to the surprise of the label executives. UMG asked Swift’s team to reconsider, reportedly claiming that it was important “to the industry” that her catalog remain off the platform.
A representative for Swift did not respond to a request for comment.
“It’s not so much that Taylor Swift needs TikTok, but rather that Taylor Swift needs a certain kind of fan engagement that TikTok makes possible,” Paula Harper, an assistant professor in the University of Chicago’s music department, told Yahoo Entertainment. The involvement that TikTok offers, Harper says, goes beyond what UMG itself can facilitate.
That’s why Swift’s camp didn’t budge on the decision to return to TikTok. Swift’s fandom expects a specific kind of lead-up to album drops that Swift has become synonymous with since her 2008 debut album.
“The way Swift’s fans work is so specific, and the way they work with her music is so specific, so it fits right into the way fandom works on social media,” Harper explained, referring to the “Easter Eggs” and codes Swift browse for fans. “The detective work and research – fan engagement on this very granular and detail-oriented scale – is something Swift needs to make her releases as successful as possible.”
Selling vinyl records of her albums is perfect fodder for social media, as are the in-person promotional events.
“It’s something that was built to spread on TikTok,” Harper said. “It’s built so that fans can post videos and other fans on TikTok can take screenshots and zoom in and enhance and work out all these sort of puzzle-like pre-release clues together that she’s leaving us.”
Swift has always used some form of social media to connect with fans. Early in her career it was Tumblr; for her Reputation release in 2017, she deleted all her Instagram posts. For 2022 Midnightsher latest album of all-new material, Swift released a track reveal video for each song in a TikTok series she called “Midnights Mayhem With Me.”
Her relationship with fans is crucial to her success. In fact, accusations that Poets Thursday had leaked the fandom, out of respectrefuse to listen.
“She needs fans to maintain the current dominance she has over the music industry,” Harper argued. “More specifically than that, she needs fan involvement.”
What about fighting for smaller artists?
When UMG announced in January that it was withdrawing its licensing agreement with TikTok, TikTok emphasized in a statement that it had helped launch the careers of many artists by being a “free promotional and discovery tool for their talent.” But one of the biggest disputes UMG had with TikTok was the low compensation for artists and songwriters.
Neither TikTok nor UMG responded to Yahoo Entertainment’s requests for comment.
Swift is a billionaire and, as Harper suggests, uses the fan engagement platform. But for an artist who threatened to pull her away 1989 album from Apple Music because the company didn’t pay artists for free trials for new customers and withheld its catalog from Spotify in protest of compensation rates for artists and producers, her return to TikTok could seem at odds with her support of up-and-coming artists.
“She has a history of these different actions that can be interpreted as solidarity with smaller artists,” Harper said. “But she has a lot more power than she exercises for those kinds of purposes. Therefore I would say to me: [rejoining TikTok] is relatively consistent with Taylor Swift’s history.”
Swift put her catalog back on Spotify a few months before the 2017 release Reputation. She indirectly drew attention to the monopoly of Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment, which has prompted a Justice Department investigation into the ticketing industry, particularly the unregulated secondary ticket market, where Swift tickets were resold for thousands of dollars. But she still works with them.
“She is fundamentally not in solidarity with the majority of artists who make money as musicians, and that’s just the reality,” Harper said.
Part of the music industry, whether UMG sees it that way or not, is TikTok. Harper argued that it is unfair to say TikTok is “synonymous” with the industry – it has become a music platform in the same way that Spotify and Apple Music are music platforms.
“TikTok is not just that [a] new way to promote music, but it is fully entrenched and recognized as part of the music industry,” Harper said. “Taylor Swift is one of the few winners in today’s incredibly multi-layered music industry.”
