It’s official—TikTok lost a huge portion of their music library because they couldn’t come to terms with Universal Music Group (UMG)on a licensing deal. 

The deal included an increase in profits that would kick back to UMG for using their artists’ audio within the video-based platform. After deeming the deal unfair, TikTok allowed UMG to strip all their audio leaving millions of people with silenced reels.

Finding accessible and appropriate audio to use for commercial purposes has always been a challenge. Now with TikTok meeting the same restrictions as platforms like Instagram and Facebook, there’s no telling what the future holds.

As a marketing firm, we’ve worked with these restrictions first-hand (and banged our heads against the wall a few times too). The good news is we’ve found innovative ways to keep audio original and fresh while meeting guidelines and restrictions for commercial use.

Here are some quick tips you can try when selecting audio for your reels: 

• Keep to short, trending, instrumental audios. They’re often open to commercial use and allow you to hop on trends without issue.
• Remixes are a great way of using the music you want even if it has licensing restrictions. 
• Take the time to create a commercial-use favourites folder for audio. Searching for usable commercial audio can be daunting, but if you take the time to do it and save the ones you like, it helps a lot when it comes to selecting audio that’s acceptable as they’re already on deck.