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British MP criticises TikTok over its restricted music experiment in Australia

By | Published on Monday 6 March 2023

TikTok

Another politician has hit out at TikTok, though specifically about the way it is treating the music community rather than the customary concerns about whether or not the Chinese government has access to the video sharing app’s user-data via its China-based owner Bytedance.

Damian Collins MP – a Conservative member of Parliament who had a brief stint as a minister in the UK government’s Department For Digital, Culture, Media & Sport last year – has written an op-ed piece in the Telegraph criticising TikTok’s ongoing experiment in Australia where it is restricting access to music.

The official line from TikTok is that that experiment – which means some Australian users don’t currently have access to some music on the platform – is part of an investigation into how “sounds are accessed and added to videos” within the app, with a view to improving and enhancing its Sounds Library of audio clips.

However, the music industry suspects that the test is very much linked to ongoing licensing negotiations between TikTok and the record labels in which the latter are looking to increase the monies they receive from the digital firm on the basis music has played a key role in the app’s huge success.

The labels suspect TikTok will try to use the results of its experiment in Australia to play down the importance of music on its platform worldwide in a bid to keep its royalty payments down.

The boss of the Australian record industry’s trade body ARIA, Annabelle Herd, recently said: “It is frustrating to see TikTok deliberately disrupt Australians’ user and creator experience in an attempt to downplay the significance of music on its platform”.

Although the experiment is only affecting Australian users, it impacts on artists globally, both in terms of their short-term ability to reach fans in Australia via the video-sharing app, and – if the results are used to try to keep music royalties down – the long-term income they can make when their music is utilised on the TikTok platform anywhere in the world.

“TikTok and its Chinese owner Bytedance have capitalised handsomely on the enormous appeal of UK artistry, using it to help attract more than a billion estimated users worldwide and soundtrack many of the platform’s most viral and successful clips”, Collins writes in his article. “But now, TikTok is trying to cut artists out of the equation, launching a new trial in Australia which is silencing creators in favour of its own self-interests”.

“Concerningly, as many as half of Australian TikTok users are reportedly no longer able to access some or all music on the platform as the company sets out to ‘prove’ that music from world-renowned artists is no longer necessary for the platform to be a success”, he goes on. “Not only is this action disruptive to huge numbers of local users, but it presents a considerable threat to the creative community around the world”.

“This degrading of the music experience on the platform runs counter to what consumers want from TikTok by denying users access to the best content”, he adds. “It also ignores the very talent that has helped create TikTok’s global significance – key among them British artists”.

Concluding, Collins writes: “We should be doing all we can to keep our British music industry globally competitive, protect our soft power and support our artists. We cannot quietly stand by and let Bytedance and TikTok stifle our world-leading creative sector with their Chinese technological iron grip while enriching themselves from it at the same time”.

“This suffocation of creative and commercial freedom must not be allowed to go any further”, he then insists, “[and] it must not be allowed to happen here in the UK”.

For its part, TikTok insists that the experiment in Australia is temporary, while also telling the Telegraph that “speculation that the test is expanding to other markets is baseless”.



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