TikTok has continually landed major deals with music companies since its launch in 2017. Its extensive library of licensed and user-made music has made it hard for competitors to compete. However, Snap – the parent company of Snapchat – this week took a step forward towards becoming a more formidable competitor with TikTok. Snap signed a multi-year deal with Universal Music Group (UMG), allowing creators to use music from UMG-signed artists in Spotlights and Stories.
Snap takes on TikTok
Songs from artists such as Queen, Justin Bieber and Katy Perry will all be accessible in the Snap Sounds audio tool. The tool has been around since October 2020, and this is one of its first major updates since launch. Overall, the library works similar to how TikTok’s library works. Users can use it to incorporate songs and sounds into their Spotlights and Stories.
It’s a fairly extensive library — with Snap already having deals with Warner Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group and Merlin. However, TikTok still seems to have an edge. The incredibly popular platform (which also has deals with UMG and Warner, along with Sony) allows users to upload their own sounds and songs. Though, Snapchat may let users upload their own audio sometime soon.
Expanding the Sounds library
Snap’s deal with UMG will add thousands of tracks to Sounds. They all will be available to all Snapchat users — iOS and Android. This is good news for Snapchat creators. Since Snap rolled out the Sounds library, over 521 million videos have included audio from the library. In total, those videos have amassed 31 billion views.
With the UMG deal adding new songs to the Sounds library, creators can be more creative with their videos — now having access to many more popular, well-known songs.