For tech giants, music is monstrously big business. Though ByteDance, which owns TikTok as well as several other platforms, has yet to turn a profit, Bloomberg recently valued it at $75 billion—three times more than Spotify’s current market value. Last year, a rare profile of ByteDance’s founder, Yiming Zhang, claimed that the company is “what comes after Facebook.”

Though TikTok is currently free and without ads, there’s endless value in its trove of videos: ByteDance’s vice president says they’re able to process 50 million GB of data every day. And analyzing its 500 million users’ video clips has potential applications for content recommendation, object recognition, and, ultimately, surveillance. The website for ByteDance’s research lab boasts, “This virtuous cycle of AI has allowed us to venture into areas of machine intelligence the world has not seen before.”

That’s great for our future android overlords, but what about the musicians whose work the AI team—and TikTok’s very lucrative business—depends on to attract users? Jeff Price, the CEO of Audiam, a company that specializes in licensing, collecting, and distributing royalties from digital platforms, tells me there’s a fundamental disconnect in the way music and tech do business. “The music industry and artists—songwriters and publishers and composers—all traditionally make money off of the sale or license of prerecorded music,” he explains. “Technology companies make their money from valuations on Wall Street or venture capital or private equity, which are based on market share, and that’s based on their number of users. They don’t actually have to make money off of music to make money. It doesn’t matter if they lose money. As a matter of fact, they all lose money.”

Copyright, of course, still applies, and musicians are technically required to get paid if their work is used. For the song in any TikTok video, there are two basic copyrights at play: the right to public performance (the composition of the song, which is typically owned by the songwriter or their publisher), and the right to mechanical reproduction (the recording itself, usually owned by the label). In America, statutory damages for breaking either can make for an intimidating punishment of up to $150,000 per violation.

That’s ostensibly why, in 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Part of a global treaty in the name of innovation, it protects tech companies from copyright claims that might otherwise squash them. Essentially, the DMCA makes these companies immune from liability for the copyright violations of their users, so long as they tell them not to do it and aren’t aware of individual violations as such. They just have to take the files down once someone tells them about it, and that burden is on musicians and their representatives. When artists see a copyright violation, they send the company a fabled DMCA takedown notice—or, in the hypothetical case of “Mia Khalifa,” four million of them, one for every video that used the song.

So when tech companies do make licensing deals, it’s typically on their own terms. In 2016, Jeff Price considered an offer from Musical.ly to license Audiam’s catalog, and asked to talk to the company about making changes to their proposed agreement. According to Price, Musical.ly’s lawyers were unwilling to negotiate. He recalls them telling him, “It’s either you can sign this contract and get paid something, or don’t sign the contract and your music’s still going to be here but you’re not going to get paid anything. You’re going to have to deal with DMCA takedowns. Goodbye.” Audiam didn’t take the deal.

That’s not always an easy decision, though. Joe Conyers III is the co-founder of SongTrust, another digital rights management platform, and he explains the trouble many rights-holders have in saying no, even professional distributors and royalty collectors. “All these services will get contacted by Facebook or TikTok or YouTube, and they’ll get the manager and the artist hyped up, and they may not understand that they are not going to get paid. They say, ‘OK, well, they’re going to put me on the front page. That’s worth it. Let’s just do it for free.’”

That’s not the only tricky part. Conyers tells me about a recent study by Music Reports, a company whose database contains the rights information for 150 million distinct sound recordings. In the 1980s, Music Reports found, songs in Billboard’s Top 10 had an average of two writers and two publishers; this decade, hits typically have four writers and six publishers. “You end up with these crazy circumstances where there could potentially be hundreds of copyright claims against a video,” Conyers says. “Everyone is going to get their fraction of a fraction of a fraction. But if you’re not part of the system, you’re gonna be out of the system.”

Once all those fractions start rolling in to publishing administrators, some of which represent over 100,000 artists, deciding how to distribute the money is another hurdle. Some platforms, like YouTube, grant access to sophisticated, searchable content ID systems. Others will simply send over a spreadsheet every month or so, and it can be difficult to verify their accuracy: If a song isn’t labeled within the system, how do you search for it? What if, like TikTok, the platform doesn’t show you total views? One common solution is to go by an artist’s market share on a different platform that offers better reporting. For example, to gauge TikTok payouts, a publishing administrator might calculate the percentage of their roster’s total plays that each artist drives on Spotify, then pay them the same proportion from their TikTok buyout.