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Universal Music sues Triller over missing payments and data
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 9 January 2023
TikTok rival Triller has started the new year with another music industry lawsuit to contend with, this time from Universal Music. The major label claims that the video-sharing app has failed to make the payments due under its licensing deal with the major for nine months now. If that sounds familiar, that’s because Sony Music similarly accused Triller of failing to make payments in a lawsuit back in August last year.
In its new legal filing, submitted last week to the LA Superior Court, Universal also claims that Triller has failed to provide quarterly usage reports documenting how the major’s music has been used in videos uploaded to the social media platform. With the missing money and data, Universal has now terminated its licensing deal with the Triller business.
The fact that Triller has failed to make the payments it promised to pay Universal is all the more annoying, the music firm says in its lawsuit, because “during the same time period that Triller was defaulting on its payment and reporting obligations, it was reported that Triller was spending substantial amounts of money acquiring companies, including Julius and Fangage, and throwing lavish events catering to members of the media and entertainment industry”.
Triller previously fell out with Universal in early 2021, with the major withdrawing its catalogue from the video-sharing app for a time. However, a new licensing deal was then agreed in May that year.
But tensions between Triller and a number of its music industry partners began to increase again last year. In addition to the legal battle with Sony, it emerged last month that the social media firm had allowed its deal with indie label repping Merlin to lapse.
Ever since the original Universal spat in 2021, Triller has tended to be quite blasé about any run-ins with the music industry, playing down the significance of its licensing deals and, since Sony went legal, the litigation.
Last month, after it emerged that Triller was removing a sizeable chunk of the music previously available within its app, the company also played down the importance of music to its business in general. It argued then that people posting videos on its platform would rather create their own soundtracks or utilise audio uploaded by other Triller creators.
Therefore, unsurprisingly, Triller is playing down the significance of its new legal battle with the biggest music rights company in the world.
A spokesperson told Variety that the new lawsuit was “minor” and pretty standard for digital firms working with the music industry. They also claimed that the dispute was with the publishing side of Universal specifically, and that the lawsuit “has no impact whatsoever on Triller or its business”.
“This is a dispute about publishing for a very small percentage of the catalogue, and is the ordinary course of business for the music industry and over a small amount of money”, the spokesperson continued. “This will be decided upon in a proper venue in a few years, and we clearly believe we are in the right and that a court will find in our favour”.
“It’s a plain vanilla case that virtually every social network has faced in one form or another”, they added. “It’s not the first and won’t be the last but similar to the past disputes of these nature they tend to settle quietly and end up being a lot to do about nothing”.
