We’re pleased to announce additional speakers for the 4th annual Artist Rights Symposium on November 20, this year hosted in Washington, DC, by American University’s Kogod School of Business at American’s Constitution Hall, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016. The symposium is also supported by the Artist Rights Institute and was founded by Dr. David Lowery, Lecturer at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business.
The Symposium has four panels and a lunchtime keynote. Panels will begin at 8:30 am and end by 5 pm, with lunch and refreshments. More details to follow. Contact the Artist Rights Institute for any questions.
We’re pleased to announce more speakers for the 4th annual Artist Rights Symposium on November 20, this year hosted in Washington, DC, by American University’s Kogod School of Business at American’s Constitution Hall, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016. The symposium is also supported by the Artist Rights Institute and was founded by Dr. David Lowery, Lecturer at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business.
The four panels will begin at 8:30 am and end by 5 pm, with lunch and refreshments. More details to follow. Contact the Artist Rights Institute for any questions.
TikTok’s decision to disintermediate Merlin and walk away from negotiations to renew its current license has sparked widespread concern across the global music industry. The platform is contacting independent music companies directly to try to reach individual deals. Many fear that with this move TikTok intends to pay less for music.
Merlin acts as the licensing partner for the independent sector, playing a crucial role in providing efficiencies for digital platforms, promoting diversity and consumer choice, as well as delivering market access and value for its members. With more than 500 members representing over 30.000 record labels, distributors, and rights holders around the world, Merlin currently accounts for 15% of the global recorded music market and has deals with over 40 digital services.
“TikTok’s decision to walk away from Merlin puts independent labels in an impossible place with their artists: it’s a choice between their music being available on the platform or ensuring fair license terms.” explains Zena White, WIN Chair. Noemí Planas, WIN CEO, adds that “Merlin was created by independent music companies to compete at the highest level and ensure they can access the best terms. TikTok’s decision poses risks to cultural diversity, market access, and fair payment for independents. But this is not just about TikTok. We urge policymakers around the world to regulate the tech sector to ensure a truly competitive market where creators’ rights are protected from abusive and monopolistic behavior.” TikTok continues to resist calls from the sector to address the existing ‘value gap’, which has a negative impact on the independents’ ability to defend their music and rights.
Asia
Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok is the world’s largest social media platform after Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Asia is home to 6 of the top 10 countries by number of users and local music companies fear TikTok’s decision threatens the level playing field. Jong-Gill Shin, Secretary General of the Record Label Industry Association of Korea (LIAK) says: “LIAK expresses profound concern over the current circumstances, which pose a significant risk of fostering discrimination against creative works. It is imperative that all music, regardless of whether it originates from major or independent sectors, be accorded equal value and recognition. We unequivocally oppose TikTok’s recent attempts that threaten to undermine our efforts to secure equitable terms. Aligned with our fellow WIN members globally, we stand resolute in our commitment to upholding and safeguarding the intrinsic value of independent music.” China’s neighbors have also raised concerns about TikTok’s compliance with data protection laws, with India banning the app over national security concerns.
North America
In the United States, the second-largest market by number of TikTok users with 120.5 million, concerns are raised about abuse of power from the platform. In April, President Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok unless ByteDance sells its stake within a year. Richard Burgess, CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), comments: “TikTok’s unwillingness to negotiate a licensing deal with Merlin is just the latest example of the platform doing whatever it can to avoid compensating artists fairly. Now, more than ever, we need Congress to enact the Protect Working Musicians Act and give musicians, songwriters, independent labels, and publishers the ability to negotiate collectively in the marketplace.”
Similar concerns are raised in Canada, where the music community is actively engaged in the regulatory process around the Online Streaming Act, which extends broadcasters’ requirements to invest in Canada’s music sector to digital platforms and is being met with mounting resistance from the tech sector. “By bypassing local regulations and enforcing unfavourable terms on rights holders, platforms create a significant power imbalance,” says Gord Dimitrieff, Chair of Government Relations at the Canadian Independent Music Association (CIMA). “It stifles competition, reduces cultural diversity, and limits consumer choice.” Andrew Cash, President and CEO of CIMA adds that TikTok’s decision “should act as a wake-up call to Canadian policy makers and politicians engaged in regulating the tech sector.”
Latin America
TikTok was the fastest-growing social media platform in Latin America in 2023. “From a Brazilian perspective, TikTok’s decision not to renew the agreement with Merlin could weaken the representation of independent music, which plays a crucial role in promoting cultural and regional diversity,” says Felippe Llerena, President of the Associação Brasileira da Música Independente (ABMI). “Without a collective agreement, small labels may have more difficulty negotiating individually, negatively impacting their visibility and participation on a platform as relevant as TikTok.” The Brazilian organization claims that this move not only compromises the diversity of content available on the platform, but also does not make sense from a commercial and strategic point of view. Brazil ranks third in TikTok users by country, with 105.3 million, followed by Mexico, with 77.5 million users, but concerns are also raised in other markets of the region. “It is extremely detrimental for the independent sector in Latin America that TikTok is applying this pressure to bypass Merlin. The very purpose of Merlin is to ensure fairer and more equitable representation for all, especially in regions like ours, and we stand by it. The most affected will be the smaller players, who will have few options, and our biggest fear is that they will end up facing the worst conditions.”adds Francisca Sandoval, President of Asociación Gremial Industria Musical Independiente de Chile (IMICHILE).
Europe
Following value gap concerns raised in April, the Independent Music Companies Association (IMPALA) hasopposed TikTok’s attempt to boycott Merlin. The European organization highlights the importance of collective deals for diversity and consumer choice, and notes that it is vital that independents and digital services work together and explore ways to grow the value of the moment economy as a key part of the music ecosystem, as proposed in IMPALA’s ten-step plan to make the most of streaming. “We believe giving labels the option to work under a collective deal is the best way for TikTok to achieve these aims and work with artists and genres from across Europe,” says Dario Draštata, IMPALA Chair and Chair of RUNDA Adria. “We respect freedom of choice in entrepreneurship. The growth of the independent sector across all platforms is fundamental to provide fans and consumers with choice and diversity, exactly what TikTok stands for. The easiest way to achieve that is through Merlin.” says Helen Smith, IMPALA’s Executive Chair. She adds: “We invite TikTok to see the value of a renewed collective deal through Merlin and collaborate on growing this important part of the ecosystem. We hope that efficiency and choice for TikTok users, as well as access for artists and labels whatever their country or genre or level of success, and of course joint and standardised efforts on fraud, will prevail.” France, Belgium, Germany, and other European countries have also come forward in support of Merlin.
Australasia
TikTok is crucial to the music industry, and music is crucial to TikTok. An experimentconducted by TikTok in Australia in 2023 to analyze how music is accessed and used on the platform showed that limiting the licensed music users can experience caused the number of users and the time they spend on the app to decline. “We are highly alarmed at the news of TikTok’s decision to walk away from the negotiating table with Merlin before any licensing renewal discussions could even begin. As if that wasn’t onerous enough, TikTok have stated their intention to seek direct deals, and provided a very, very short runway for labels to sign an NDA. This would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so disrespectful and further demonstrates that TikTok’s behaviour completely undermines their previously stated support of worldwide independent rights holders. IMNZ, as representative and advocate for New Zealand artists and labels, joins with our global compatriots in the hope that TikTok makes the right decision – and finds its way back to the licensing table with Merlin, and smartly”, says Dylan Pellett, General Manager at Independent Music New Zealand (IMNZ).
WIN is committed to ensuring that all businesses in the music sector are best equipped to maximize the value of their rights, regardless of their size and origin, and Merlin is a key partner in this. The global independent music community remains steadfast in its support for collective licensing negotiations and calls on TikTok to return to the table and work on solutions that benefit all parties involved.
We’re pleased to announce the speakers for the 4th annual Artist Rights Symposium on November 20, this year hosted in Washington, DC, by American University’s Kogod School of Business at American’s Constitution Hall, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016. The symposium is also supported by the Artist Rights Institute and was founded by Dr. David Lowery, Lecturer at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business.
The four panels will begin at 8:30 am and end by 5 pm, with lunch and refreshments. More details to follow. Contact the Artist Rights Institute for any questions.
SHOW ME THE CREATOR – Transparency Requirements for AI Technology, moderated by Linda Bloss-Baum, Director of the Kogod School of Business’s Business & Entertainment Program
CHICKEN AND EGG SANDWICH: Bad Song Metadata, Unmatched Funds, KYC and What You Can Do About It, moderated by Chris Castle
NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF AI: Current initiatives to protect creator rights and attribution, moderated by John Simson, Program Director Emeritus, Business & Entertainment, Kogod School of Business, American University
Additional confirmed speakers to be announced soon.
Summary: The fight over frozen mechanicals continues to pay off as songwriters log another cost of living increase for physical/downloads while streaming falls farther behind.
The Copyright Royalty Board adjusted the US statutory mechanical royalty for physical carriers like vinyl, CDs and downloads annually during the current rate period. This is entirely due to the success of public comments by the ad hoc songwriter bargaining group that persuaded the Copyright Royalty Judges to reject the terrible “frozen mechanicals” settlement negotiated with the NMPA, NSAI and RIAA.
As it turned out, once the judges rejected the freeze as unfair, the labels quickly agreed to a fair result that increased the physical/download rate from a 9.1¢ base rate to the 12¢ rate suggested by the Judges which went a long way to making up for the 15 year freeze at 9.1¢. In fact, if it had just been presented to the labels to begin with, a tremendous amount of agita could have been saved all round.
Crucially, not only did the base rate increase to 12¢, the judges also approved a prospective cost of living adjustment determined by a formula using the Consumer Price Index. The end result is that unlike streaming mechanicals paid by the streaming services like Spotify (i.e., not the labels) the value of the increase from 9.1¢ to 12¢ has been protected from inflation during the rate period (2023-2027).
Unfortunately, the streaming services were allowed to reject a cost of living for streaming mechanicals, notwithstanding the Judges’ and the services’ acceptance of an COLA-type adjustment to the multimillion dollar budget of the Mechanical Licensing Collective. That COLA is ased on a government measurement of inflation (the Employment Cost Index) comparable to the CPI-U that is used to increase the services’ financing of salaries and other costs at the Mechanical Licensing Collective. So those who are paid handsomely to collect and pay songwriters get a better deal than the songwriters they supposedly serve.
What is the increase in pennies this year for the physical/download mechanical rate? The Judges determine the inflation-adjusted rate every year during the five year rate period (2023-2027). The calculation is made in December for physical/download with reference to the CPI-U rate announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as of December 1, which means the rate published on November 11. The new rate goes into effect on January 1, 2025.
At this point, there does not seem to be any indication that there will be a large spike in inflation between now and November 11, so we can use the September rate (just announced in October) to make an educated guess as to what the 2025 statutory rate increase will be for physical/downloads (rounded down):
So we can safely project that the base rate will increase from 12.4¢ for 2024 to about 12.6¢ in 2025 without firing a shot. If you have a 10 x 3/4 rate controlled compositions clause, that means the U.S. controlled pool on physical will be approximately 94.5¢ instead of the old frozen rate of 68.25¢.
It’s important to note a couple things about the relevance of CPI-U as a metric for protecting royalty rates from the ravages of inflation. First of all, the CPI-U is a statistical smoothing of the specific rates for particular goods and services that it measures and doesn’t reflect the magnitude of changes of some components.
For example, the September CPI-U increased by 0.2% on a seasonally adjusted basis. However, the shelter index and the food index increased at higher rates:
The shelter index rose by 0.2%, and the food index increased by 0.4% Together, these two components contributed over 75% of the monthly increase in the all items index.
Chris Castle said, “These are good benchmarks to keep in mind as we head into a new rate setting period in a year or so when I expect songwriters to demand a COLA for streaming mechanicals. No more poormouthing from the services. If they can give it to MLC, they can give it to the songwriters, too.”
We’re pleased to announce the 4th annual Artist Rights Symposium on November 20, this year hosted in Washington, DC, by American University’s Kogod School of Business at American’s Constitution Hall. The symposium is supported by the Artist Rights Institute and was founded by Dr. David Lowery at the University of Georgia Terry College of Business.
The symposium panels currently are:
THE TROUBLE WITH TICKETS: The Economics and Challenges of Ticket Resellers and Legislative Solutions, moderated by Austin music attorney Chris Castle.
SHOW ME THE CREATOR – Transparency Requirements for AI Technology, moderated by Linda Bloss-Baum, Director of the Kogod School of Business’s Business & Entertainment Program
CHICKEN AND EGG SANDWICH: Bad Song Metadata, Unmatched Funds, KYC and What You Can Do About It, moderated by Chris Castle
NAME, IMAGE AND LIKENESS RIGHTS IN THE AGE OF AI: Current initiatives to protect creator rights and attribution, moderated by John Simson, Program Director Emeritus, Business & Entertainment, Kogod School of Business, American University
Lunchtime keynote, panelists and program materials to be announced soon.
Remember the “MIC Coaltion”? We haven’t heard from them in a while but they suddenly surfaced with a vengeance in the form of this letter to the Copyright Office under the guise of “PRO proliferation.”
This is the MIC Coalition membership. The MIC Coalition is dedicated to one thing and one thing only–screwing songwriters as hard as they can. And frankly, anyone else who gets in their way. If you’re good with zeros, you can add up the total market capitalization of all the companies that these trade associations represent and you will be into the $50,000,000,000,000 range.
That’s right, $50 trillion–and all these companies are protected by the government through the longest running antitrust consent decrees in the history of the United States. And who are they protected against? Songwriters. Pullllleeeeeeze.
With one exception: Global Music Rights or “GMR”. And while the letter to the Copyright Office doesn’t come right out and say it, what these people hate the most about GMR is that these behemoths have to actually negotiate directly with GMR rather than hiding behind the government in the rate courts. That’s right, they truly hate that free market. While the MIC Coaltion’s letter raises issues about multiple PROs, the one they really have the wood for is GMR because GMR has an extremely valuable catalog. In fact, if you can judge by comparing private equity placements, GMR–based on true free market licensing–is about 3x more valuable than BMI–based on the government’s crap deals. Which also pisses them off.
You also have to understand that these MIC Coalition people are hugely pissed off about a recent BMI rate court case that applied GMR benchmarks–free market negotiations–to set the government’s consent decree rates. Rates that are supposed to approximate what a willing buyer would pay a willing seller in the government’s version of free enterprise. That case is on appeal right now. You can get a flavor of just how silly this argument is from a post on Artist Rights Watch that discusses the case in detail or read this revealing friend of the court brief from the BMI rate court appeal.
The reason the trillionaires hate GMR so much is because songwriters got together and started their own PRO. Freedom of association, freedom of contract and free to bargain collectively, all quintessentially American values protected by the Constitution. Even though many radio stations settled an antitrust case with GMR resulting in a long-term license, they obviously haven’t given up sniping at the startup.
Unfortunately, the trillion-dollar soul crushers seem to have conned Congress into believing that Big Government is the way to go instead of protecting the free market. The plot sickens.
One day shortly after the sale to PolyGram, I got a call from Cheryl Engels with a problem she needed help with. Cheryl at the time was A&M’s post-production director in mastering. Among other things Cheryl supervised our audio assets storage room (which was mostly tape assets at the time) and also supervised mastering of new releases for other labels and artists such as U2.
Cheryl had received a call from some putz in PolyGram Special Markets demanding our best quality masters be shipped to some place in New Jersey to be made into yet another stupid compilation record to be sold as God knows what kind of tchotchke. In other words, our recordings were going to be used for the sole purpose of commoditizing music and being yet another place outside of A&M where our artist’s recordings could be purchased.
Cheryl had told this putz that he didn’t need our precious masters and that she’d be happy to run him off a DAT for his one track. So why was she calling me? Because of what he said next: “We’re the parent and you’re the child and the child doesn’t tell the parent what to do.”
I said just leave this with me. I called the guy and said, “Hi, my name is Chris Castle. You don’t know me but I’m calling to explain to you why you’re not getting what you want, Mr. SVP of Bullshit. So first thing, I’ve been to your tape storage facility—are you going to store our masters by the broken water pipe or the space heaters? Near the open window or in the car park? And when would we get our tape back?”
After some back and forth, he accepted that this time it was different at least with A&M. He apparently thought that Cheryl had been difficult with him. I explained to him that he just needed to learn how things were done. I explained to him that in Cheryl’s area the way things were done was the way Cheryl wanted them to be done—because she was correct. I suggested to him that it worked for Herb Alpert, Bono, Sting and many other top artists and mastering engineers so maybe it could work for him, too. And more importantly for him at that moment, it worked for me and I was backing Cheryl 100% with no daylight.
In signing off, I said, “and by the way, if we have a “parent” at A&M, his name is Jerry Moss and I’d be happy to transfer you to him right now if you have any questions.”
And as they say, that was that. Another thing about Cheryl was that she kept track of the tape library which means that she knew where all of the original rolls and rolls and rolls of audio tape were that included outtakes, rough mixes, etc., etc., that are created as part of making a record, especially a high profile record.
Even with Cheryl Engels TLC, the media eventually wear out, whether it’s sticky shed syndrome for magnetic tape, or other degrading phenomenon for hard drives.
Steve Harvey writing in Mix Magazine has a very serious wakeup call coming our way:
[F]or the past 25 or more years, the music industry has been focused on its magnetic tape archives, and on the remediation, digitization and migration of assets to more accessible, reliable storage. Hard drives also became a focus of the industry during that period, ever since the emergence of the first DAWs in the late 1980s. But unlike tape, surely, all you need to do, decades later, is connect a drive and open the files. Well, not necessarily. And Iron Mountain would like to alert the music industry at large to the fact that, even though you may have followed recommended best practices at the time, those archived drives may now be no more easily playable than a 40-year-old reel of Ampex 456 tape.
This is why post production directors like Cheryl Engels were so insistent about quality control for the last 30 years. The problem came up when we were working on a lot of 5.1 mixes in the 2002 era and it’s coming up again with immersive as Steve Harvey points out. It will keep coming up as new mixing techniques required going back to the original multitracks. And 5.1 emulation is not the same as true 5.1.
Read Steve Harvey’s article—it’s very important to prepare for hard drive hell. Thankfully, Iron Mountain has some techniques up the sleeve to help, but trust me we are way past baking tapes in a hard drive reality. For unlike a magnetic recording that at least might allow one pass over the tape heads to transfer it to a new storage medium, hard drives may end up just being bricks. Assuming that tape wasn’t stored under a dripping water pipe in a basement, parents and children being what they are.
We’ve had a pretty good track record over years of spotting astroturf operations from the European Copyright Directive to ad-supported piracy. Here’s what we believe is the latest–“the People’s Bid for TikTok,” pointed out to us by one of our favorite artists.
The first indication that something is fake–we call these “clues”–is in the premise of the campaign. Remember that the key asset of TikTok is the company’s algorithm. That algorithm is apparently responsible for curating the content users see on their feeds. This algorithm is highly sophisticated and is considered a key factor in TikTok’s success. The U.S. government has argued that the algorithm could be manipulated by the government of the People’s Republic of China to influence what messaging is promoted or suppressed.
In April, President Joe Biden signed a law requiring TikTok’s PRC-based parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban in the U.S. by mid-January 2025. This law was the culmination of years of Congressional scrutiny and debate over the app’s potential risks.
So–who is behind the “People’s Bid” since given that the “People’s Bid” seems to be making a proposal that will only be acceptable to the People’s Republic of China? We say that because of this FAQ on the People’s Bid site disclaiming any interest in acquiring the algorithm that PRC has essentially claimed as a state secret for some reason:
The People’s Bid has no interest in acquiring TikTok’s algorithm [which is nice since the algo is not for sale]. This is not an attempt to rinse and repeat the formula that has allowed Big Tech companies to reap enormous profits by scraping and exploiting user data. The People’s Bid will ensure that TikTok users control their data and experience by using the app on a rebuilt digital infrastructure that gives more power to users.
Oh no, The People’s Bid has no interest in that tacky algorithm which wasn’t for sale anyway. Good of them. So who is “them”? It appears, although it isn’t quite clear, that the entity doing the acquiring isn’t “The People’s Bid” at all, it’s something called “Project Liberty.”
The FAQ tells us a little bit about Project Liberty:
Project Liberty builds solutions that help people take back control of their digital lives. This means working to ensure that everyone has a voice, choice, and stake in the future of the Internet. Project Liberty has invested over half a billion dollars to develop infrastructure and alliances that will return power to the people.
They kind of just let that “half a billion dollars” drop in the dark of the FAQ. What that tells us is that somebody has a shit-ton of money who is interested in stopping the TikTok ban. So who is involved with this “Project Liberty”? The usual suspects, starting with Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain and a slew of cronies from Berkman, Stanford, MIT, etc. Color us shocked, just shocked.
But these people never spend their own money and probably aren’t working for free, so who’s got the dough? Someone who doesn’t seem to care about acquiring the TikTok algorithm from the Chinese Communist Party?
Forbes tells us that this transaction is just a little bit different than what “The People’s Bid” or even the “Liberty Project” would have you believe if all you knew about it was from information on their website. The money seems to be coming in part, maybe in very large part, from one Frank McCourt whom you may remember as a former owner of the Los Angeles Dollars…sorry, Dodgers. In fairness, McCourt isn’t exactly making his plans a secret. He had his Project Liberty issue a press release as “The People’s Bid for TikTok”, which is actually Frank McCourt’s bid for TikTok as far as we can tell and as reported by Forbes:
Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Frank McCourt is organizing a bid to buy TikTok through Project Liberty, an organization to which he’s pledged $500 million that aims to fight for a safe, healthier internet where user data is owned by users themselves rather than by tech giants like TikTok parent ByteDance, Meta and Alphabet.
That’s more like it. We knew there was a sugar daddy in there somewhere. That’s much more in the Lessig style. Big favor, little bad mouth.
Of course, users owning their data is not the entire story by a long shot. Authors owned their books and Google still used the vast Google Books project to train AI.
Forbes adds this insight about Mr. McCourt:
Best known as the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, McCourt spent most of the past decade focused on investing the approximately $850 million in proceeds from the team’s 2012 sale via his company McCourt Global.
He sprinkled money into sports, real estate, technology, media and an investment firm focused on private credit. In January 2023, McCourt stepped down as CEO of McCourt Global to focus on Project Liberty but remains executive chairman and 100% owner.
McCourt’s assets are worth an estimated $1.4 billion, landing him on Forbes’ billionaires list for the first time this year—though his wealth is a far cry from the estimated $220 billion valuation of ByteDance.
Which brings us to ByteDance. Is there another Silicon Valley money funnel with an interest in ByteDance? One is Sequoia Capital, which was also an original investor in Google which was an original investor in Professor Lessig and his various enterprises including Creative Commons. Sequoia’s ByteDance investment came in the form of one Neil Shen who runs Sequoia’s China operation recently spun off from the mothership. If you don’t recognize Neil Shen, he’s the former member (until 2023) of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party and its United Front Work operation. (According to a Congressional investigative report, The United Front operation is a strategic effort to influence and control various groups and individuals both within China and internationally. This strategy involves a mix of engagement, influence activities, and intelligence operations aimed at shaping political environments to favor the CCP’s interests. United front work includes “America Changle Association, which housed a secret PRC police station in New York City that was raided by the FBI in October 2022.”)
McCourt said he is working with the investment firm Guggenheim Securities and the law firm Kirkland & Ellis to help assemble the bid, adding that the push is backed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web [OMG, it must be legit!].
McCourt joins a host of other would-be suitors angling to pick up a platform used by 170 million Americans. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced in March he’s assembling a bid, as well as Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian chairman of the private venture capital firm O’Leary Ventures.
TikTok, meanwhile, has indicated that it’s not for sale and the company has instead begun to mount a fight against the new law. The company sued to block the law earlier this month, saying that spinning off from its Chinese parent company is not feasible and that the legislation would lead to a ban of the app in the United States starting in January of next year.
But it’s the people‘s bid, right? Don’t be evil, ya’ll.
Let’s boil it down: TikTok would have been, up until President Biden signed the sell-or-ban bill into law, a HUGE IPO. It’s also a big chunk of ByteDance’s valuation, which means it’s a big chunk of Neil Shen’s carried interest in all likelihood. TikTok is no longer a huge IPO, in fact, it probably won’t be an IPO at all in its current configuration, particularly since the CCP has told the world that TikTok doesn’t own its core asset, the very algorithm that has so many people addicted (and addiction which is what a buyer is really buying).
So the astroturf is not the Liberty Project of the People’s Bid. Whatever “the People’s Bid” really is, it’s much more likely to be as the financial press has described it–Frank McCourt’s bid. But only for the most high-minded and pure-souled reasons.
It’s about the money. Stay tuned, we’ll be keeping an eye on this one.
The Trichordist 
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