One of Ariana Grande’s best-loved songs from her most recent album, “the boy is mine,” quickly became a dancing trend on TikTok after her release. Any other time, it would seem obvious—even normal—that a prominent pop star’s new single was going viral. Surprisingly, the song is available on TikTok at all given the ongoing licensing dispute between Grande’s record label Universal Music Group and TikTok.
Grande’s music is not the only one that has remained on the app for a long time after UMG’s previous license expired at the end of January. Some well-known songs connected to UMG have managed to evade the company’s TikTok boycott, largely due to the ingenuity of fans, artists, and their teams. Although circumventing the ban benefits the promotion of these songs separately, it also benefits songwriters as they provide TikTok with UMG hits without incurring any fees.
Olivia Rodrigo’s new song, “so American,” was recently uploaded to TikTok as a “original sound” by a fan under the nickname LouLiv. Rodrigo also incorporated the sound in a few recent TikToks, which helped increase the song’s awareness. Along with other songs from Everlasting Sunshine, Grande’s fans have been remixing the song “the boy is mine” on TikTok, which has helped the song become more popular there.
These original sounds frequently alter the official recording in order to evade TikTok’s detection technology, which is designed to automatically identify tracks—like UMGs—that are not authorized to be on the platform. They do this by altering the song’s pace, pitch, or title. According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, TikTok’s detecting technology searches for metadata supplied by UMPG and UMG before deleting the clip. However, TikTok’s original noises that are still there and aren’t removed automatically are so abundant that at times it seems like UMG never left the app as all.
It is also not difficult to locate the tunes. For instance, the most well-known version of Rodrigo’s “so American” is simply called “so American,” and 33,400 videos have been made using the song so far. After weeks on TikTok, the most popular original audio for “the boy is mine” was taken down, suggesting that UMG is taking down some original sounds that exploit their library. There are still a number of other original audio versions of the song, such as “the boy is mine” by star and “the boy is mine sped up” by satvrn, totaling over 100,000 videos on TikTok with the song’s original audio.
The repercussions are bad for songwriters. Non-UMG recording artists who have collaborated with UMPG songwriters on recent or upcoming releases have requested—and the songwriters have agreed—that the songwriters on the track withhold information about who wrote the song at the time of its release in an attempt to avoid the UMG TikTok ban. This request was made in two different text and email chains that Billboard examined.
