Ballads were all the rage, and we’re not talking about Stairway to Heaven. These were songs sung straight from the mouths of balladeers: musicians who went from place to place setting lyrics to music for the public’s listening pleasure. The tunes they played were often already well-known. But instead of coming up with the lyrics themselves, these itinerant performers might have just bought a new sheet of lyrics from a budding songwriter. And so the commercial music market as we know it was born. Universal Music Group threatens to pull millions of songs from TikTok in rights disputeThis is acco…