TikTok Signs Agreement to Pay Royalties in Canada

The Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency has just struck a deal with TikTok that will allow canadian artists to receive royalty payments from their music after it’s been used on the app. This will allow artists to not only be paid for the use of their songs on TikTok, but to also be credited for the work they created. 

The agreement between TikTok and the CMRRA states that an artist will receive royalties every time their song is featured in another person’s TikTok video. Members of the CMRRA who own Canadian copyright to certain songs will also receive a payment. 

TikTok’s use of music from unknown and popular artists has been a staple of the app’s brand for quite some time now. Earlier this year, Warner Music Group signed a licensing agreement with TikTok that would grant them permission to use music from Warner Chappell Music and the rest of WMG’s music catalog. And, according to mxdwn, TikTok also struck licensing deal with Sony Music Entertainment back in November 2020. 

While TikTok’s wild popularity has only continued to soar, the company has taken a few hits over the past year. In August 2020, former president Donald Trump threatened to ban the app from the U.S., and also issued an executive order demanding that the Chinese owned company be replaced by an American owned company in 45 days, or else it would be wiped out completely. Eventually, according to mxdwn, TikTok ended up suing the Trump administration on Aug. 24 over a due process violation, claiming that the Trump administration “had to prove they were a threat to national security before attempting to [ban] the platform.” 

In Canada, the Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) took a huge hit when the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that two-tier payment model would not be guaranteed to songwriters, even after the SOCAN made the argument that composers and publishers should be paid whenever a song is made available on a streaming platform, and every time a song is either downloaded or streamed by a user.