In the drawn-out contract battle between TikTok and Universal Music Group, a high-profile exemption has been made for Taylor Swift. A few of her songs became available again as TikTok sounds on Thursday, just a week before the release of Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. It remains unclear what kind of arrangement was made for her official music to come back or how long it will remain on the social media platform.
Madeline Macrae, a Swift fan and TikTok creator, heard the news Thursday morning and immediately started searching TikTok and Google to confirm it wasn’t some hoax. “I’m really excited to have that catalog back, and I don’t have to rely on sped-up versions or edited versions,” she says. “I can just use her actual music.” Songs like “Cruel Summer,” “Cardigan,” and “Style (Taylor’s Version)” can now be used by content creators on the platform, as first reported by Variety.
In addition to being excited about using Swift songs in new videos, Macrae is grateful for the pop megastar’s music to be potentially unmuted for her past videos on TikTok. “I was going back and forth on deleting them or keeping them, because they look kind of silly muted,” she says. When UMG’s music was initially pulled from TikTok’s library in January, many creators were stunned to see their archive of past videos with certain songs go silent overnight.
Does this mean that The Tortured Poets Department album will be available to use for videos on TikTok? It’s uncertain, but Macrae is hopeful: “I think this move also just shows the power of Taylor Swift.” Billie Eilish, another major UMG artist, will soon be promoting her upcoming album, May’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, but Eilish fans will have to wait to see if her music also returns to TikTok before it drops.
Most UMG artists have been absent from TikTok for nearly 10 weeks, greatly shifting the user experience on the social media platform and opening the door for non-UMG artists, like Beyoncé, to go viral with TikTok’s algorithm.
It remains a mystery when the long-standing contract dispute between TikTok and UMG will come to a resolution. As one of the biggest record companies in the world, UMG removing songs from TikTok has impacted the careers of many established artists as well as rising stars. Multiple artists expressed frustration about the move, often citing disrupted marketing plans or decreased audience reach. A spokesperson for UMG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
No matter what eventually happens between the two companies, Swifties on TikTok are feeling grateful for her music’s return as they prepare for listening parties to celebrate the new album. “I already know my Friday night plans,” says Macrae. “Staying in with friends, drinking some wine, and just listening to this album.” Sounds like an evening of truly social media.
The blending of the real and unreal could explain why some followers of faux Drag Race get so passionate about what they’re seeing on their feeds. Michael says he “lives for the overreactions of fans” who believe his creations are real people. He says people often ask him for a queen’s actual Instagram handle.
“I also get the occasional hate comment from someone saying I’m taking away jobs from real drag queens,” he says. As an illustrator himself, Michael says he’s aware “that AI is coming for my job,” but doesn’t believe his Instagram passion project is taking money away from humans. “If someone isn’t going to the club and tipping a real drag queen because they saw AI Drag Race, that’s a problem with the person and not my Drag Race,” he says.
Fantasy Drag Race’s Más says she has gotten into scrapes with other creators in group chats, too, after questioning how seriously they were taking the whole process. “I’m a queer, nonbinary Mexican in upstate New York,” she explains. “Someone saying that my drag competition isn’t their cup of tea or that some look I made is ugly isn’t going to affect me at all.” Still, she says, it’s understandable that people get emotionally attached to her work.
Unfortunately, that kind of attachment also comes with a sense of looming dread, since the whole idea of AI-generated Drag Race is a play on a big franchise. While some creators argue that what they’re doing is parody, posting what Grimmelmann says are “almost completely useless” (or perhaps pointless) copyright disclaimers absolving themselves on their main Instagram page, others acknowledge that they’re likely building their followings on shaky ground.
A number of accounts, including one that featured exclusively Disney characters, have already been pulled off Instagram, giving creators who use only animated or existing characters more than a bit of pause. “I’m very scared of getting taken down,” says Haus of Dreg’s Boopy. “But if I did, then so be it. I mean, what could I even do?”
“I make sure that I don’t do anything to sexualize the characters, and I don’t do anything to diminish their actual tone,” Horror Drag Race’s Shayne adds. “I’m just merging two mediums—horror and Drag Race—and blending it up into something that both groups of fans can enjoy.”
It’s not just Drag Race fans that are enjoying the AI experience, either. Mhi’ya Iman Le’Paige, a queen from season 16 of Drag Race, just wore a look down the runway that first originated in a run of AI-generated images. One of her season 16 sisters, Plane Jane, follows at least one of the AI creators.
The Official AI Drag Race’s Michael says he has had multiple queens reach out asking to use their fictional creations as inspiration, with an unnamed queen from an international franchise asking Michael to design their entire package of runway looks based just on his Carla Montecarlo images. “I feel like it’s only a matter of time,” Michael says, “before I’m watching TV and spot something that I rendered a year ago.”
This is where the Unknown is revealed, so we have tension as well.
I arrived on the day. I was like, “So what’s going on with this tunnel?” What they’ve done instead of this incredible, magical starlit tunnel is basically just stapled up some chequered flags into a corridor and put some dirty mirrors that I think they must have found in, like, the toilet or something, just along the corridor. This was meant to be the Twilight Tunnel.
Yes, I saw the illustrations on the website.
You’ve probably seen the videos online. That’s where the infamous Unknown character appears from behind a mirror and starts unnecessarily scaring the kids. There’s no need! There is no need to scare the kids that much. They were scared enough.
Then we went through something called the Imagination Lab, which I think the point was that you’re supposed to imagine it was something better. That was where I was to hand out one jelly bean.
Where does the lemonade come in?
The next room was the Lemonade Room, which sounds amazing. It was just some cheap lemonade, in the bottles still, that was poured. You got a quarter of a cup of lemonade, if you were lucky.
That was the experience, me leading everyone through, just talking gibberish, slowly losing my grip on reality.
There’s something so hilarious to me about a single jelly bean. Why did they have you guys only giving out one?
They didn’t buy enough jelly beans! They didn’t even buy enough lemonade! We had to switch to limeade because we ran out! This is the thing that blows my mind. You know how many people are coming. One jelly bean per customer, that’s tight. Wonka’s a tight-fisted old man.
Can you explain to me what exactly is happening in the viral picture of the Oompa Loompa (sorry, Wonkidoodle)? What is she doing? What’s her purpose at that little desk?
I think she was asking herself the same question. It was meant to be a laboratory where the magical beans are made. She was actually doing science, you know, creating the magical beans.
Women in STEM, yeah.
Yes. I do know it looks like a meth lab, but you don’t know how magical beans are made, you know.
Where is the smoke coming from? What was that?
Something was probably on fire. No, I do think they had a smoke machine. But there was one point where we did smell burning and we were worried that something was on fire.
I kept saying throughout the day, “Someone’s going to get hurt.” There was a bouncy castle on a concrete floor! How no kid just went bounce [smack motion] is beyond me.
What was Coull doing during the event as this was all happening?
Walking in circles was all I kind of saw him do. He was just running around—he should have been the Unknown, actually, because he was pretty good at just, like, appearing out of nowhere, whispering in my ear like, “You’re spending too much time with the kids,” and then disappearing into the night.
Fanbinding has exploded in popularity in the past few years. Many fanbinders do adhere to a strict gift-economy stance in line with the writers they’re binding the work of, often limiting money they collect, if any, to covering material costs. But the people selling bound versions of popular fics for profit are cut from a different (book)cloth. As they make money off works the authors themselves cannot sell, they’re putting those authors—and, arguably, fanfiction itself—in an untenable position.
“Technically speaking, the reproduction right belongs to the author of the fic, because that’s the ‘copy right’: They are the only person with the right to make copies of the fic,” says Stacey Lantagne, a copyright lawyer who specializes in fanfiction and teaches at Western New England University School of Law. Even though she notes it “might be considered an unsettled question of law officially,” fic authors do hold the copyright to the original parts of their stories, though of course not the underlying source material.
Is it legal to bind someone else’s fic? “Here is a typical lawyer answer: it depends,” Lantagne jokes. She says “it is likely legal to print someone else’s fanfic for your own personal, noncommercial use,” adding that could likely extend to paying material costs for someone else to bind it, too. “Noncommercial” here is key. Like the legal status of fanfiction itself, the legality of fanbinding rests on fair use, the exception under US copyright law determined by factors like how transformative a work is, or if someone is profiting off it—and taking money away from the rights holder in the process.
Fanfiction communities have historically relied on good-faith communication when it comes to doing something else with someone’s fic. Nothing’s stopping you from translating, or remixing, or creating an audio version (known as podficcing), or, yes, printing and binding a version, but it’s nice if you ask first. Some writers post blanket permissions allowing any noncommercial engagement with their works, and some, especially in these hyper-popular corners of fandom, have specific guidance about fanbinding. Last year, a charity auction that garnered huge sums of money to bind others’ work led some writers—SenLinYu included—to modify their policies to allow personal, noncommercial fanbinding only.
While plenty of fans have respected their wishes, there is clearly demand for these books—and thus, continued supply. Lantagne says that since litigation is extremely expensive, the only recourse a fanfiction writer likely has in this situation is to file DMCA takedown notices, a very tedious process when there are multiple sellers on multiple sites. “This is what copyright holders have been complaining about ever since the DMCA was passed in the late 1990s—it’s a pain to have to file a DMCA notice everywhere copyright infringement crops up,” she says. “However, the alternative is something like YouTube’s Content ID being used to automatically block uploads, which we know is notoriously bad at accounting for fair use.”
Although illegal sellers obviously deserve a good portion of blame, that continued demand—regardless of fic authors’ wishes—speaks to the way both scale and money has been altering the fanfiction world in recent years. To be clear, there was never one singular “fanfiction community” or universal set of norms, but the widely accepted gift-economy framing has always been undergirded by the fact that many fanfiction readers are also writers, and stories are shared within fandoms, with all the structural ties they bring. Pulling-to-publish was often framed as a betrayal—we were all in this non-monetized boat together, and now you’ve jumped ship and cashed in.
In her delightfully cheeky Verizon Super Bowl commercial, Beyoncé swore to do one thing: Break the internet. As the commercial demonstrated, she could not—at least not in the literal sense. Instead, after the commercial ended, she did something else: She hacked the internet, dropping two new songs, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” the former of which is already on its way to becoming TikTok’s viral dance song of the year.
This was always going to happen. Pretty much everything Beyoncé does—every album drop, every outfit—goes viral. That’s why her Verizon commercial didn’t look like a shallow attempt to astroturf hype. Moreover, “Texas Hold ’Em” is a big pop-country crossover track, and its rapid banjo riffs (from maestro Rhiannon Giddens) and lyrics about whiskey and taking it to the floor are perfect for line dancing. Line dances, which lend themselves to fun mimicry and interpretation, naturally do well on social platforms. It would have been weirder if TikTok hadn’t been flooded with new dances in the week after the song dropped. (If you’re looking for the video that best exemplifies this trend, check out this chart-topper from performers Matt McCall and Dexter Mayfield and then just follow the sound on down, down, down.)
Inevitability, though, isn’t the whole reason “Texas Hold ’Em” is currently the backing track to nearly 134,000 videos with millions of collective views. The song is boot-scootin’ its way onto TikTok at a time when a lot of music has been muted on the platform following a dustup between TikTok and Universal Music Group.
Back in January, after the two companies failed to come to terms on a licensing agreement for UMG music, the massive record company pulled songs that it owns the rights to from TikTok, including cuts from artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. That means any video using music from those artists now plays without sound. Beyoncé’s music is distributed by Columbia/Sony, a UMG rival, so “Texas Hold ’Em” now sits at Number 5 on TikTok’s Viral 50 list.
Now, like a shiny holographic disco horse, Beyoncé is atop the social web. When she announced her new album, Act II, and dropped “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” the internet was in a tizzy about the fact that Beyoncé was making what appeared to be a whole country album, a continuation of the country-infused “Daddy Lessons” from 2016’s Lemonade. (“She coming to put the cunt in country!!” went the replies on the @BeyLegion X account. “‘Daddy Lessons’ reloaded!” went another.)
On Tuesday, “Texas Hold ’Em” made Beyoncé the first Black woman to debut at number one on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. The song has currently been streamed nearly 20 million times.
TikTok sounds don’t count toward Billboard chart rankings, but there is no doubt that viral dances create the kind of hype that leads to song streams, album sales, and radio play. Beyoncé has no control over the TikTok/UMG situation (probably), and she had no way of knowing whether their licensing dispute would still be ongoing when her new music dropped (again, probably), but its existence has paved the way for her new song to be one of the biggest things happening with music on the platform right now. No doubt it would’ve hit these heights regardless, but with less competition, there’s nothing holding it back.
