The timing is probably coincidental but it's hard to miss: Universal Music Group, one of the music industry's major labels, just signed a partnership to put its music in Roblox through a virtual boombox item cleverly called Boombox:
“By integrating Boombox, UMG solidifies its position as a vanguard of music innovation within the gaming sector,” said Alvaro G Velilla, senior vice president, New Business at UMG. “This integration not only enhances superfan experiences on the platform but does so with an extensive array of fully licensed music from UMG's global roster of artists and labels, setting a new standard for how music can be integrated into the platform for the entire sector.”
This comes just a few weeks after TikTok was hit by bad news from UMG:
Universal's music was licensed to TikTok until earlier this year - but they let the license lapse after failing to reach an agreement over how much the app should pay artists.
As a result, the label's recording catalogue, which is around three million songs, was removed at the start of February.
The publishing catalogue deal runs out at the end of the week, which means another four million songs are expected to be pulled from the platform.
Boombox is ad-driven, so it's something like a Pandora of virtual worlds, and therefore a very different experience from how the music is played in TikTok. Then again, Roblox enables millions of users to immersively share/enjoy/dance to music in real time.
The main takeaway for me is that Roblox is close to competing in audience scale with TikTok. While it's impressive that TikTok has 170 million users in the US, I'd estimate Roblox has 120-140 million users in the US (from its worldwide player base of 354 million MAU).
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