Snap Inc is in talks with the Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment to license songs that users embed in posts. According to reports, the new deal will let users access a large archive of songs to post on Snapchat.
This will be in close resemblance to features on TikTok and Instagram. Instagram users now upload videos along with music on their Insta stories. It seems like tech companies, including Snap, are exploring the music feature as a major attraction for users.
Viral social media videos have made certain songs more popular. Such was the case of the mannequin challenge back in 2016. The “Black Beatles” song by Rae Sremmurd turned into the sensation at every party and made it almost mandatory at every gathering.
Snap with music
More recently is how social media platforms pretty much launched Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” The song, which gained popularity as a meme on TikTok, has now become the number one song on the Billboards Top 100 for several weeks.
This is probably why Nigerian artistes now pay influencers to dance to their tracks or promise gifts to online users who mime their songs. Social media seems like the new platform on which music can be marketed.
Facebook also signed a similar licensing deal with the three major American record labels in 2018. It granted the site access to music and videos across all its platforms. They include Facebook, Instagram, Oculus and Messenger.
These licenses allowed Facebook to roll out features like Lip Sync Live, which was an identical clone to Musical.ly. The Chinese company, ByteDance, bought Musical.ly in 2018 and turned it into TikTok.
ByteDance is now working to secure more license deals for TikTok so that it can own its own music streaming service.
However, Snap’s deal is not going to be as a music streaming platform. It will gear towards being able to actively compete with the likes of TikTok and Instagram. Copyright issues have been a real contention between tech giants like YouTube and record labels recently.
Snap seems to be tightening all such ends and save itself some legal trouble.