“Spotify Killer” TikTok Music Is Dead Already, and more news

TikTok Music is shutting down for good, Spotify has added AI playlist creation, Canada wants some streaming money and thousands of music videos have vanished off of YouTube.

Automatic Transcript (may have errors):
00:00 So some crazy things have gone down in the music industry in the past week or so, including TikTok Music shutting down globally in November before even had a chance to come to the United States, Spotify adding AI playlist generation where you type in a text prompt and it makes a playlist, which we're
00:14 actually going to do a dry run, I've literally never tried it, on camera for you today. A bunch of major music companies, including the major record label sending letters to Canada trying to get them to throttle their kind of insane government overreach thing, which I'll explain to you when we get
00:27 to it. And lastly, a bunch of huge music videos and thousands of artists worth of music videos being pulled off of YouTube because of some negotiation issues with YouTube and SESAC, a performance rights organization.
00:40 So yeah, let's first dive into TikTok's shutting its music subscription account. Now TikTok music was being talked about by a lot of people as this Spotify killer and the reason is TikTok had a pretty firm grip on the music industry for a while and it still does.
00:53 So the idea of them entering the music streaming game and being their own DSP was kind of exciting for a lot of ways.
01:00 One, it's nice to have more competition, especially your platform that maybe pull a bunch of market share from Spotify and you actually force them to innovate and maybe pay artists better, but it was also scary because nobody pays musicians worse than TikTok.
01:15 Now granted, TikTok is a social media platform, not a DSP, but if you look at the numbers for how you get paid on TikTok, you can quite literally have hundreds of millions of views of your music on TikTok and get paid in some cases less than a dollar.
01:29 So it's significantly worse paying the Spotify, which made me a little bit nervous what happens when they have a music platform.
01:34 Does it pay even worse than Spotify, which already they don't pay the worst, but they're kind of in the lower end of the middle.
01:40 So they didn't even make it to the United States. They're still going to keep running TikTok. This is just TikTok music shutting down.
01:45 And what they're going to be doing is focusing on their ad to music app functionality, which if you don't know, maybe I'll find an old video and link to it if I can.
01:54 They have this feature where if you have a song, you can you can click the song and TikTok can click add to music and you could link your Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon Music account and you could just click one button from TikTok and save the song in your library on your platform.
02:10 And so basically they're giving up and having their own platform and they're going into deeper integrations with existing music companies.
02:17 So based on this TikTok music had about two to 2.5 million subscribers in the various markets, they're estimating that Spotify could get a 1.3 million paid subscriber additions from people who were bailing TikTok music because it's shutting down and you're listening to other platforms.
02:31 So because of this Spotify, like people have a they're looking at this as a win for Spotify. So that's the Spotify, or that's the TikTok music and then the Spotify TikTok music side of things.
02:43 Now let's transition to something completely different which is Spotify expanding its AI playlist feature. All right, so over here I have my Spotify account from my screenshot and my phone right here and we're just going to try out this feature.
02:54 I literally have never tried this. So I don't know how it's going to be. I'm going to click the plus button.
02:59 And by the way, I'm in my library section. You can see in the bottom. So here, I'm just clicking the plus button.
03:03 And there's this AI playlist thing. So AI playlist beta, turn your ideas into playlist using AI. Now I mostly listen to alternative metal.
03:10 Actually, now I'm just going to say an alternative metal playlist. I was going to say mixes big artists and smaller artists, but I want to see what it does by default.
03:17 Like does it mostly just give us industry stuff? Or does it give us a blend. Pretty much all big artists, which is kind of expected, right?
03:27 That's I don't think that's the industry doing some crazy industry stuff. I think that's just that's what people are listening to the most.
03:34 So that's what it's recommending. So let's do refine this playlist. Can you make a blend of big, well-known artists and artists metal?
03:46 I'm guessing this is just chat GBT and they're just using chat GBT's output to create a playlist. Let's see what it does now.
03:54 Dabbing into a mix of established and emerging all metal audits for a fresh yet familiar vibe. Still a lot of the same, but maybe if I scroll down, we'll see something different.
04:04 We don't. All right, so here I did new alt metal bands that aren't well known at saying, diving into the underground tracks to bring you some fresh alt metal tracks.
04:11 Once again, I'm still just getting the biggest, literally biggest alternative metal artists in the world. Granted, I do like a lot of these songs.
04:20 In fact, most of them. Almost all of them are songs I know and love and they're the right genre. So it does a pretty good job I'm a little upset that you can't like get it to give you anything from the biggest of the big I'm a little upset that we it's so limited to just big stuff because like the scary
04:37 thing about AI playlists is It's it's it's mostly it's good right it's making it's easier for people to find music that they love the downside of this If it's only sharing the things the people like are that's already popular.
04:49 It's already big It's not really the most fair ecosystem, it's mostly just benefiting major label artists and that means Spotify can just kind of tune the algorithm to do whatever you want.
04:58 So what if in the future they were to have a marquee or showcase-like feature where you could pay for extra ability to show up in these AI-generated playlists, right?
05:08 Spotify's generating them for you and they could be like 20% of the playlists is sponsored and artists will pay to get in them, which could end up leading to mostly major art.
05:18 Now, I don't want to turn us into a whole conspiracy thing, but it freaks me out a little bit that you can't even get it to give you small artists.
05:27 Maybe there's good reason for that. Maybe there's a bad reason for that. But that's the feature. Now, this next topic is a little more niche, and maybe a little more nerdy, but essentially, the Canadian government is known for constantly trying to regulate platforms to funnel things back to promoting
05:44 Canadian sources, Meaning they want to promote Canadian music and Canadian television and Canadian movies and all this stuff They want to promote their own Created stuff which makes sense like the government should support it's on people and one thing that's great about Canada They have this awesome
06:00 grant program if you live in Canada You can actually get a bunch of free money or grants from the government that you can use to pay for your marketing And I've gotten so much so many Canadian clients over the years that have come to me because of these grants It's like, hey, I have a couple thousand
06:16 dollars, I was given this money from the Canadian government, and I want to be able to do it, use it to run a marketing campaign, which is phenomenal.
06:24 However, one of the dark sides of this is that the Canadian government is constantly pushing these BS rules in ways that can actually harm streaming.
06:33 So for example, a streaming platform like Spotify is trying to regulate streaming services like radio. And one of the consequences of that is that 5% of the revenue has to go into subsidizing in Canadian content, which also means is harming the platform, which also means the platform is not as excited
06:50 to work in that country, which can actually end up hurting people who live in that country, and they have all these rules about how they regulate the promotion of content in those countries.
07:00 So the platforms have to specifically develop features that allow them to kind of prioritize Canadian content on the platform, which again, which hurts the platform, makes the platform not want to focus on that country as much because they're losing more money from that country.
07:13 And I just think it's a bad thing overall. Like the Canadian government is great about funding their own internally created media.
07:19 But if you look into any of these programs, you'll realize very quickly that most of this stuff, this regulation on this, on like them trying to regulate streaming like radio and force them to spend money on stuff like this, it really just hurts everyone.
07:34 And it especially hurts the independent creators in these countries. So, you know, if you're a Canadian, I would look into this and vote accordingly, or reach out to people in your government accordingly, because stuff like this, when I looked into it, can actually harm.
07:49 But basically, this news is that these major music companies, which include so many music, Universal Music, Warner Music, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify are all telling them like, hey, this is not going to help your people in the same way that you think it is.
08:06 So very, very, very, very much a big deal for people who live in Canada, especially for the rest of us There actually doesn't matter like it doesn't matter for me.
08:12 I live in the United States, but for you Canadians I which there are a lot of you out there. I talked to a lot of Canadians every week.
08:18 This is a huge deal Now the last thing we're going to talk about today is this is this is actually a really big deal A ton of videos like thousands of videos, Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Nirvana, Bob Dylan, Green Day, Mariah Carey, REM just some examples pretty much as far as I know anyone that's working
08:33 with CSAC and if you're not familiar with SESAC in the United States and I don't know if it's North America or the United States specifically, but if you want to register your music with the performance rights organization, there's BMI, there's ASCAP and there's SESAC.
08:46 SESAC is the more exclusive one, usually bigger artists happen to be on SESAC because it's like an invite-only type of deal.
08:53 So YouTube and SESAC couldn't reach an agreement on how to handle, you know, the licensing and the new royalties going forward and they couldn't agree.
09:02 And this is like, you know, this isn't just for big artists. Seesack represents 35,000 artists and publishers, but mostly artists.
09:09 And essentially they couldn't agree on terms. So what happens is when the end of their contract hit, it just expired and YouTube was forced to pull all the videos because they can't just be like having unlicensed content on their platform.
09:26 Like they can't just break the log and so they just had to pull everything. So now they're trying to go back and redo this but what this means is temporarily all this music I haven't pulled in the platform and the crazy thing about this is that if you're just an artist and you're trying to get your,
09:41 you know, you're with SESAC and your music is on YouTube, you're kind of just like you weren't involved in this discussion whatsoever ever and all of a sudden your videos are just down.
09:52 So this is the example of what I call like industry bullshit that happens that if you're an artist, you kind of don't have any control over it.
10:01 It's just industry bullshit that's happening around you and you just have to live with it, you know. Some artists might come out and speak against this stuff, but at the end of the day it almost doesn't matter because there's one giant corporation against another giant corporation and 35,000 artists
10:14 in the middle are just kind of like apologizing to their fans. So, big deal, but if you've gone on YouTube and realized that much of music videos are missing, this is why.
10:24 So, all of that stuff is music business, music industry news, which a lot of it is stuff you can't control, because you're not a multi-billion dollar company, but what you can't control is how you promote your own music, whether you're an artist, a label, or manager, or whatever.
10:36 And for that, check out this video right here to learn how to promote your music on streaming platforms using Facebook ads, and this video down here is whatever YouTube thinks you should watch next.
10:44 So, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next video. Bye.