Universal Music’s Stand Against TikTok Defends Artists’ Rights (Guest Column)
variety.comJonathan Taplin Jonathan Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the author of “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto.” He was tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band in 1969.
He has written this op-ed at the request of Universal Music Group. On Monday, these pages featured a defense of TikTok that could easily have been ripped from the headlines of the 2000’s.
I remember debating publicly John Perry Barlow, a songwriter for the Grateful Dead and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about how Napster was decimating the record royalty earnings of most of my musician friends, including my former employer, Levon Helm of the Band.
John Perry was adamant that the promotional power of Napster was healthy for the music industry. For Levon, who had throat cancer and needed expensive medical care, it was a disaster.
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