TIKTOK'S OLE OBERMANN: THE HITS INTERVIEW

There aren’t many things that the incoming Trump administration and the left-leaning music community agree on, but saving TikTok is probably near the top of that very short list.

Back in April, Congress passed a law requiring TikTok’s Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, to shut down the platform or sell it to a non-Chinese owner. For a music industry that has become reliant on, if not addicted to, TikTok and its 1 billion monthly active users to break new artists, lift back catalog and generate hit song after hit song, shuttering the app would wreak havoc on its bottom line. (TikTok’s global reach has grown to over 170 billion daily video views of licensed music.) Lawyers for TikTok challenged the government ruling in a legal filing, and the case could still end up in front of the Supreme Court, but the (shudders) results of Nov. 5 may have averted all that, as the president-elect has signaled a willingness, for reasons best left unparsed, to allow ByteDance to maintain its control of TikTok.

Ole (pronounced OO-lah) Obermann, global head of Music Business Development for TikTok, tells HITS that he’s been way too busy over the past six months to let the company’s existential uncertainty weigh on him. Which is exactly what a polished C-suite executive is supposed to say, but Obermann has had his own fires to put out. In May, TikTok and Universal Music Group struck a deal to return UMG’s music to the platform after UMG had very publicly pulled its catalog in February. Then, in October, TikTok was accused of acting in bad faith when it chose not to renew its licensing deal with indie-label collective Merlin, opting instead to make deals directly with individual Merlin members.

In a Zoom conversation, Obermann, who came to TikTok in 2019 after successful stints atop the digital departments of Warner Music Group and Sony Music, doesn’t shy away from discussing the tsuris wrought by such intense, high-profile negotiations, but he brightens perceptibly when signal-boosting his favorite creators (e.g., Trackstar), left-field success stories (Blood Orange’s “Champagne Coast”) and next-big-thing triumphs (Benson Boone, Gigi Perez).

Give me your year in review. What's 2024 been like for TikTok?

Oh, wow. I think a year in TikTok is like a dog year.

It’s been pretty chaotic?

Yeah. I'll talk about music specifically, because otherwise there's just too many things to talk about.

As you know, we had a couple of big licensing challenges. Universal Music Group was a really big topic for us, for them, for the industry. I spent several months incredibly deep in that situation, but I'm really happy where it all landed. In the five-plus years I've been at TikTok, the relationship with Universal has never been better. We recently did massive campaigns for Billie Eilish, Post Malone and Sabrina Carpenter, among others. We've got some emerging artists that we're working on with them. There's just so much dialogue now, and I think we understand one another a little better than we did.

And then obviously there’s the Merlin thing. It is a shame that it became us-against-Merlin in the press, because as I said a few times publicly, it really wasn't about us versus Merlin. We have the utmost respect for Merlin. It was just about us wanting to do direct deals with members of Merlin, because we think we can do a better job operationally working with those labels if we're in direct deals with them. We didn't renew some of the deals for the labels that we have identified as being consistently infringing or delivering fraudulent content, and we wanted the control to not be in business with those labels.

You can imagine that TikTok—which is very user-generated, and there's lots of sped-up, slowed-down, mashed-up content, and all these kinds of super-interesting creative things happening—is also like a welcome sign for some bad actors who are, like, “Let me see if I can get away with delivering a catalog that doesn't belong to me, but it's sped up, and maybe I'll collect a bunch of money, and then they'll catch me in month two or three and shut me down.” We were battling that, and we decided the way to get around it was to just do the direct deals.

With artists and songwriters JADE and Kamille at the inaugural TikTok for Songwriters event

How many deals is that?

Several hundred, and then obviously some of those are big aggregators where you have hundreds or even thousands of labels coming through them.

Let's go back to the UMG negotiations. Was there a single issue that needed to be resolved for the deal to be reached, or was it more a multitude of issues?

There was obviously a value conversation: What are the payments that are happening, and also how much marketing and promotion can we provide to help with the discovery of new music or new artists that are priorities for them? So that was one thing that we were wrestling over, and we ultimately got there. AI was a big one, too. At the beginning of the year, the conversation around it was so loud, it was all anybody was talking about, and there was this doomsday outlook: "AI is going to put the music industry out of business, and artistry and creativity are never going to be the same," and thank God, here we are almost a year later, and really, none of that has happened.

During the time that we were working on the deal, I think both sides just didn't understand one another's positions well enough, and it was also such early days that both sides were very hesitant to commit to things around AI. Even just the handful of months that went by allowed both sides to cool off a little, and then come back to the table and say, "OK, we can be partners in making sure that AI evolves in a healthy way,” and so we got there on that.

With regard to the UMG artist campaigns you spoke of earlier, can you drill down a little bit on one of them and describe what made it stand out?

Let's take Sabrina Carpenter. For her, we created a dedicated Sabrina Carpenter #shortandsweet in-app experience that had all sorts of entry points to her music. We featured our “Add to music app” button, which is a really big focus for us, and we got 15 million people adding her songs to Spotify, Apple or Amazon from that landing page.

We can't do a Sabrina Carpenter-type built-out bespoke product campaign for every artist, but on a few big ones we can do it, and everyone loves it: fans, the label, the artist, the manager.

With TikTok Global Head of Music Publishing Licensing and Partnerships Jordan Lowy and erstwhile Global Head of Music Operations
Paul Hourican at the TikTok Pre-Grammy Event in 2023 (Photo: Joe Scarnic, Getty Images for TikTok)

When was the "Add to music app" feature added to TikTok?

It’s been around for about a half a year. We were testing it in very small numbers for months prior to that, and it’s now widely available almost everywhere.

Is there any relationship between the “add to” feature and the shuttering of the TikTok Music streaming service?

We launched “Add to” prior to TikTok Music being shut down. And since we publicly disclosed that we are not going to be in the premium music-streaming business ourselves, our label partners have opened their arms even more to us.

Sabrina is a top Grammy nominee. Who are some of the other nominees for whom TikTok has played a key role in their ascent?

Benson Boone is definitely a great TikTok story. Back in February, March, I started seeing it all over TikTok. Then, a week or two later, it was just everywhere. It’s an amazing song but also an artist who visually just worked so incredibly well on the platform. A friend of mine who produced a song of his and who's really into TikTok told me, "I think Benson Boone maybe understands TikTok better than any other artist I've worked with."

What do you think that means? What does Benson Boone get about TikTok?

I think he knows how to make an engaging video on TikTok that is still music-first. It's about his music, but it's also about him as an artist and a person, someone you're going to want to watch, to listen to, to follow, to see more content from. He really gets it. Look, that song was a hit no matter how you slice it, right? That's still what it's all about. But the speed with which he was able to get that song in front of people, I think TikTok played a huge role in that.

Obermann and Nielsen Executive Chair David Kenny at the DLD24 conference in Munich

There's a perception, fair or not, that TikTok can help generate hits but not long-term artist success. And perhaps being known as a “Tik Tok artist” can even be detrimental to creating a sustainable career. What's your response to that criticism?

First, it's not our responsibility or our expertise to do long-term artist development. We would love to be a part of the journey, and we love to be there for album two, three, four, five and hit single 10, 20, 30. The deeper the relationship with that artist, the better. But one of the artists I definitely want to talk about is Charli xcx, because TikTok was a huge part of the whole “Brat” movement and all the different dimensions of Charli xcx that we saw.

When I worked at Warner, Charli was already a priority, and this was eight, nine years ago. There were some hit songs, there were some hit singles, but she just hadn't become the global superstar she is now. TikTok wasn't the whole story, but it was a massive part of what drove her from 10 to 100 this year. While I wouldn't call that artist development per se, I would call it taking an artist from having a hit single to being a household name around the world.

Is there an artist-development story newer than Benson Boone that you take particular pride in?

Do you know “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez? I'm still getting my head around that one. It kind of came out of nowhere, and it's beautiful, just her with her guitar, just playing it. That's the video that I keep seeing—there's not anything gimmicky. It's just an amazing, pure singer-songwriter song that's having its moment.

What's the most common misconception artists and their teams have when approaching how best to use TikTok?

Even though it's been a bunch of years since we morphed from Musical.ly to TikTok, there is still, in some communities, this misconception that the artist needs to get out there and do a dance to their song, and then it's going to go viral. There are times when that works, right? Because there's a fun, new dance, and the song's right for it, and the artist has some really engaging way that they perform the dance. But you can do so many different things with the music besides that.

Do you know the artist Blood Orange and his song “Champagne Coast?”

I know Blood Orange, not the song.

It's an amazing song. It was released in 2011, and it's blowing up right now. People are posting that song along with beautiful landscapes on TikTok, and now it’s huge on Spotify and Apple Music. That has nothing to do with some novelty dance. It's a song with an amazing vibe that people are pairing with the right visual or video, and it’s gone massive on the back of that.

Speaking of older songs AND dances, suddenly the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps” is a hit again.

In Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular, there were tons of creations of a dance that people were doing to “Maps,” or there was actually a dance to a sped-up version. When Karen O sings, "Wait," all these users were doing this movement where they put their hand out, and now the song has just exploded all over TikTok.

With artist Sam Ryder

Setting aside music for a moment: Given the uncertainty over the company’s future in the U.S., what’s the mood been like in the office? Are people pensive? Anxious? Is it sometimes hard to concentrate on the work at hand?

You don't get a lot of that. For one thing, this has been going on for a little while, and so if you don't have some ability to tune it out, you're going to have a hard time working here. Shou Chew, who's our CEO based in Singapore, is very consistent with this message, which is, "Just keep executing better than anybody else. Just stay focused on doing the thing that you're in the company to do, whether that's running music, writing code, building out e-commerce or LIVE, or all the different things we have going on." I don't spend time thinking about it.

For real?

Yeah, I really don't. Today I'm thinking about it a little bit, because there’s an election happening [the interview took place on the morning of 11/5], but it's not like I wake up in the morning and think, "Oh my God. Are we going to get banned?" I just don't.

I have to imagine you get calls from fearful label execs, no?

Nah. Honestly, never. They call me, and they're, like, "Have you heard this new song?" When the legislation was signed in March, I got a couple of calls and texts where people were, like, "Is this a joke? Is this misinformation? Is this real?" Almost, like, "Come on. This can't really be happening.” I think everybody has a pretty healthy mindset on it.

Is there a feeling from people you speak with that TikTok has become, in essence, too big to fail? That it's just too important to the American consumer for it to not exist?

I want to be a little careful what I say here, but I definitely don't disagree with that. There are so many livelihoods, so many cultural moments, so much, frankly, education. So many things are happening across a really big user base that it is hard to imagine that you could just pull the plug on that.