Almost everyone who owns a phone in 2024 most likely has the app TikTok downloaded on it. Recently, you may have been scrolling through your TikTok for you page, following, or even your own videos lately and probably realized that most music from popular artist like Kanye West, Drake, Black pink, Olivia Rodrigo, and many more have been removed or muted off the app. And I am here to tell you why.

First of all, if you are unfamiliar with the popular app TikTok, it is a social media platform which was formerly known as “Musical.ly”. It consists of doing trends, lip-syncing to popular songs, or dancing to songs. The app Tiktok has over 1 billion monthly users and is one of the 4th largest social media platforms in the United States.

Now why would they remove the songs from popular artists you may ask? Well, the app had an agreement with a famous music provider called Universal Music Group which is the world leader in music-based entertainment. To make it simple to understand, pretty much the two’s contract together expired. The app was unable to renew the contract with UMG because of TikTok allegedly being unwilling to pay artists and song writers from UMG appropriately.

Another thing that was brought up as to why Universal Music Group no longer wanted to have ties with TikTok was the app not being able to protect music artists from people using AI in a harmful way which could mess with the music artists images in many ways. As of February 2024 most music was removed and many peoples’ TikTok videos were muted. No need to worry though, because there are still thousands of  songs to choose from and use from most artists and from people that post music audios on the app. Although TikTok tries to mute those as well, they definitely are not all muted.

Many people were annoyed that the app did not give much of a notice that this was going to happen which caused confusion and they felt TikTok should have come forward sooner to discuss this happening. Many users did not find out about this change until it had already happened.

Despite this happening, TikTok is still many people’s favorite app and will continue to be run and work like normal and there should not be anymore big changes for a while.