Even though TikTok is a new platform the phenomena this article describe isn't new. It can also be attributed to other publisher industries than music, i.e. boo

Even though TikTok is a new platform the phenomena this article describe isn't new. It can also be attributed to other publisher industries than music, i.e. book publishing. Imagine you where a startup and you go to a VC. The VC tells you that they want to invest. However, they want full ownership of your IP, they want their investment money repaid by taking 100% of your startup's earnings before the company can use any profits (read; It must be entered as an expense in the accounts), and you are not allowed to take out any personal salery until they have their money back. After they have gotten their initial investment money repaid, they want 85% of all profits forever. In return they will maybe try - and this is important - they will MAYBE try to help you succeed. Basically you must accept that you need to do all the lifting, not only the heavy lifting but all lifting. Would you take their investment money? Probably not. These terms are ridiculous. But artists, writers and other creative producers of their own content have had to live with these kind of terms since forever. The reason has been that the publishers controll the market. They own or control the distribution, and they have the market budgets and connections (often even ownership) to get access to media, whether it is the radio or TV shows that promote your content through talk shows and airplay, or it is the magazines that write about you and your product. Almost no content on the commercial media platforms are there by chance or because an editor found them interesting. It's a market in play. We might think (and maybe hope) that social media and different self publishing platforms will change this, but the market and industry has gone from too little distribution to too much distribution. There is so much content put out into the market every day that it it is next to impossible to get enough attention to your product. On top of this the attention span on platforms like TikTok is very short. Warhols' 15 minutes is today 15 seconds. I do not believe we will see the end of publishers like record labels. We will see a shift in their role, and maybe in power distribution among the different players in the market. However, so far it seems like it is the media companies that take all the profit nowadays. Spotify is an excellent example of this, but also "older platforms" like YouTube.