Following the expiration of their contract on Wednesday, January 31, songs by Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, and other artists whose tracks are under Universal Music Group (UMG) are currently unavailable and have been removed from the social media platform TikTok as they failed to reach a new licensing agreement.

On January 30, UMG released an open letter addressing the expiration of their contract by the end of January.

UMG stated that they have been presenting their concerns to their partners, including TikTok.

“In our contract renewal discussions, we have been pressing them on three critical issues—appropriate compensation for our artists and songwriters, protecting human artists from the harmful effects of AI, and online safety for TikTok’s users. We have been working to address these and related issues with our other platform partners,” the music label stated.

However, the UMG said that the video-sharing platform offered unsatisfactory payment on the compensation for the artists and songwriters despite its massive and growing success.

“With respect to the issue of artist and songwriter compensation, TikTok proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay,“ UMG said.

They added, “Ultimately, TikTok is trying to build a music-based business, without paying fair value for the music.”

The music group also said that TikTok allows AI-generated recordings on the platform, even developing AI tools. It also made little effort in dealing with content moderation.

“On AI, TikTok 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,” they expressed.

UMG continued: “Further, 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.”

Artists such as Kendrick Lamar, U2, Lewis Capaldi, Bad Bunny, Lana Del Ray, Katy Perry, Billie Eilish, and Bob Dylan who have some of their songs under the music group were also pulled out from the platform.

TikTok expressed their disappointment in UMG and said their accusations are "false."

“It is sad and disappointing that Universal Music Group has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters,” the social media platform stated.

"Despite Universal's false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent," they added.

As of now, all videos on the platform which have songs by artists under UMG are all muted and new videos with those tracks cannot be posted.

Unofficial, sped-up, slowed and reverbed versions are still available to use.

Some users and netizens took to X to air their sentiments on videos being muted, replacing it with other songs available on the application.

“TikTok is now a weird thing because of the conflict with UMG lol,” a netizen wrote.

“I cannot believe the umg thing on tiktok, rip to my edits, my best edit got muted AHHHH,” another user posted.