The most remarkable aspect of the pending legislation in Congress that would force a sale of TikTok is how much money and how many high profile lobbyists have taken the CCP’s shilling (or maybe yuan) to push the obviously corrupt company’s water. And yet…the legislation is advancing by leaps and bounds and TikTok is failing.

David was interviewed by Billboard to give a perspective. The headline here is that TikTok appears to be doing the same thing that Spotify was doing when Spotify was sued by Melissa Ferrick and David–using songs without a license.

The music industry’s view of the proceedings in Washington is mixed. The perspective of artists and songwriters is arguably best expressed by David Lowery, the artist rights activist and frontman for the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, who also was one of more than 200 creators that, in early April, signed an open letter to tech platforms urging them to stop using AI “to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”

“The rates TikTok pays artists are extremely low, and it has a history — at least with me — of using my catalog with no licenses,” Lowery says. “I just checked to make sure and there are plenty of songs that I wrote on TikTok, and I have no idea how they have a license for those songs.” 

As a result, Lowery says that while “I’m kind of neutral as to whether TikTok needs to be sold to a U.S. owner, the bill pleases me in a general way because I feel that they’ve gotten away with abusing artists for so long that they deserve it. I realize the bill doesn’t punish them for doing that,” he continues, “but that’s why a lot of musicians feel they really deserve it.”