TikTok has been removing famous singers’ songs because of Universal Music Group’s licensing agreement with them.

On Saturday 21 January, TikTok started removing songs from famous singers like Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, and numerous others. That’s because Universal Music Group removed its artists’ songs from the video-sharing app after failing to reach a licensing agreement with them. Does that mean you can’t use UMG’s music anymore? Not really, let me explain.

When recording a video, you can upload your music or put some in the background, which means you can still use Drake’s or other artist’s music. When you upload music to your video TikTok has a program called ACR (automated content recognition) to scan music to see if it is copyrighted. Although it doesn’t catch everything, copyright owners or record labels also run ACR on the platform. If they see one of their music being copyrighted, they can send a takedown notice to TikTok and they will therefore remove the music from the video.

The problem is that the ACR doesn’t detect remixes or covers of music but it is still copyrighted. For example, if you decide to sing a Drake song in Spanish with a different melody they can still sue you, but you can plead non-guilty, and if you have enough proof to prove yourself innocent, you win and can keep using the song. If you aren’t your video gets removed from TikTok.

The final complication for the platform, when people use popular music, they almost always put short clips from music which makes it harder for ACR to identify the songs. TikTok has now removed the sound from most videos using UMG’s published song.