Why Taylor Swift fans are going full throttle on TikTok

Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors

Taylor Swift's music is back on TikTok after Universal Music Group banned its artists' catalogs from the social platform.

Swifties – already excited about the release of The Tortured Poets Department next week — embraced the update by incorporating as many songs from Swift's extensive discography into their videos as they could.

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

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

Other fans simply danced their hearts out, lip-syncing every word of every song they could find.

As of Thursday, April 11, all of Swift's songs available on the app appear to be from Lover on – meaning all tracks from Swift's signing to UMG in 2018, including tunes from her re-recordings of Taylor's Version. (Scooter Braun famously bought Swift's former label Big Machine in 2019 – owning the masters to the Grammy winner's first six albums. After a very public dispute with Swift, he sold the masters to Shamrock Holdings the following year.)

UMG released an open letter earlier this year detailing its decision to remove its artists' discography from the app and citing concerns about “fair compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and “Online safety for TikTok users”. “

The company specifically claimed, “TikTok is trying to build a music-based business without paying fair value for the music,” and further claimed that the app “enables the flooding of the platform with AI-generated recordings – and the development of tools as well.” to enable, promote and encourage the creation of AI music on the platform itself – and then demand contract law that would allow that content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists, which is nothing less than promoting the replacement of artists with AI means.”

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

TikTok responded to UMG's claims by saying that the company puts “their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters,” and pointed out that their large number of users – which they claimed are over 2 billion amount – essentially a “free advertising and advertising measure” is a discovery vehicle for [UMG’s] Talent.”

Swift, for her part, is releasing her eleventh studio album. The Tortured Poets Departmentnext Friday, April 19 – TikTok users expect to be able to use songs from the album on the platform.