The decline was concentrated among viral tracks, and reduced playlist inclusion may have prolonged the loss of streaming demand.
A study of Universal Music Group’s catalog withdrawal from TikTok finds that losing TikTok exposure reduced aggregate demand for the label’s songs on Spotify. The decline was concentrated among viral songs, while less prominent songs changed little in economically meaningful terms.
The researchers also find that songs losing TikTok exposure were less likely to appear in playlists, potentially extending the initial decline in streaming demand. They argue that conflicting results from earlier studies partly reflect the use of statistical methods that emphasize different parts of music’s highly uneven audience distribution.
What happened to streaming
Removing TikTok access lowered aggregate Spotify demand for Universal Music Group titles. The losses were concentrated among viral songs; the study reports little economically meaningful change in the long tail of less prominent songs.
The researchers report that the top 10% of songs accounted for 96% of TikTok creations and 76% of Spotify streams in their data. Evidence from a 2025 U.S. TikTok outage that affected labels more broadly pointed in the same direction. The study also finds that lost TikTok exposure reduced playlist inclusion, linking the initial loss of exposure to longer-term declines in streaming demand.
The authors show that common approaches for comparing changes over time can emphasize different parts of a heavy-tailed distribution, in which a small number of songs account for much of the activity. They provide guidance and an interactive tool for choosing among these approaches.
