TikTok - King of the Scum?

[GregB]

For a change I thought I'd offer a controversial rant 

 

I was delighted (and a little stunned) to see in my CD-Baby Sales Reports that just one of my tracks, the instrumental "Six Degrees North", was getting an extraordinary number (for me) of 'hits' on TikTok --- 33,895.   There was no explanation if this meant my music had been used in other people's videos, or whether my own video was actually being shown.

 

My excitement was soon doused. TikTok represented 95% of this track's total 'hits' but, of these, 32,990 showed absolutely NO PAYMENT AT ALL (the payment field was completely blank, as opposed to $0.000)!   

 

I thinks most of us consider the Western behemoths of Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Google etc.. as rich bastards who screw every artist with a fraction-of-one-cent payment per play.  But this pales by comparison to Chinese businesses.  Anyone who follows this area of geopolitics will know of neverending revelations of direct theft from the West (with the encouragement and protection of the current CCP which itself has proved to be corrupt from top to bottom).   

 

According to The Sun (UK) Dec 18 2021:

 

TikTok is owned by Beijing-based technology company ByteDance, founded by the Chinese billionnaire entrepreneur, Zhang Yiming. The 38-year-old was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in 2019, who described him as "the top entrepreneur in the world".

The West just loves people who make money, regardless of their methods!

 

As said elsewhere, I was never in this for the money.   But it'd be nice that, if there was ever enough income for just an occasional cup of coffee as a reward, it wasn't being siphoned off by some underserving scum!

 

*SIGH*