Why Taylor Swift Fans Are Going Full Throttle on TikTok

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Taylor Swift’s music is back on TikTok after Universal Music Group banned their artists’ catalogues from the social platform.

Swifties — already beside themselves with excitement for the release of The Tortured Poets Department next week — rejoiced in the update by including as many songs from Swift’s extensive discography in their videos as they could.

“The official Taylor Swift music is back on TikTok?! War is over,” wrote @cassiesbooktok, accompanied by a clip of her stepping back in shock.

“OMG THIS MADE MY WHOLE YEAR 😂😫,” @jessicagolich captioned her TikTok, which showed the display of Swift songs fans can now add to their TikTok footage.

Other fans simply balled out by dancing and lip-synching every word of every track they could find.

As of Thursday, April 11, it appears that Swift’s songs available on the app are all from Lover on — a.k.a, all of the tracks from Swift’s 2018 signing from UMG, including tunes from her Taylor’s Version re-recordings. (Scooter Braun notoriously purchased Swift’s prior label, Big Machine, in 2019 — therefore owning the masters of the Grammy winner’s first six albums. After a very public spat with Swift, he sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings the following year.)

UMG posted an open letter earlier this year detailing their decision to scrap their artists’ discography from the app, citing concerns about “appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users.”

The company specifically alleged: “TikTok is trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music,” further claiming that the app “is allowing the platform to be flooded with AI-generated recordings—as well as developing tools to enable, promote and encourage AI music creation on the platform itself – and then demanding a contractual right which would allow this content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists, in a move that is nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI.”

UMG also argued that “TikTok makes little effort to deal with the vast amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists’ music and it has offered no meaningful solutions to the rising tide of content adjacency issues, let alone the tidal wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment on the platform.”

TikTok hit back at UMG’s claims by stating that the company is prioritizing “their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters,” noting that their extensive amount of users — which they claimed is over 2 billion — is essentially a “free promotional and discovery vehicle for [UMG’s] talent.”

Swift, for her part, drops her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, next Friday, April 19 — with TikTok users expecting to be able to use songs from the album on the platform.