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When TikTok Music was announced last year everyone in the music business wondered if it would eventually become a competitor to the likes of Spotify, Deezer or Apple Music. It turns out that we’ll never know because the service’s parent company ByteDance just announced that it would be shutting down in the few markets that it’s already in.
TikTok Music in its present state is a full-fledged music streaming platform that came online in July of last year, but it’s only available in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore and Mexico. That’s until November 28th, after which the service will shut down permanently.
Possible Reasons
So why would such a powerful brand shut down its brand new service before it really got started worldwide?
The company says the reason is that they want TikTok to concentrate on their current partnerships with music distributors like Spotify, but many in the industry aren’t buying it.
A likely reason (although not verified because no one officially talks about behind-the-scene streaming finances) is that ByteDance couldn’t pull off the licenses needed for a worldwide launch to proceed. If you think the streaming services don’t pay much, TikTok pays far less, so the major labels weren’t going to budge on this unless the royalty deals were at least on par with what’s currently in place with the major streaming services.
Another reason could be that, despite TikTok’s popularity, the conversion to TikTok Music was lower than anticipated. This could very well be, since the differences between streaming services is mostly the user interface as they all have the same music. There’s not much incentive to switch if there’s not much new being offered.
Yet another reason is that TikTok is facing being blocked in the United States because of suspected collection of data via the Chinese Government. It’s possible that TikTok Music might eventually fall under the same scrutiny, and it wasn’t worth it for ByteDance to spend the massive outlay it would take to break the service in the US and Europe.
I don’t think anyone is going to cry any tears over another online service closing. We’ve had dozens or even hundreds fall by the wayside in recent years, and the online world just moves on. In this case, it’s not even a blip on the music industry’s radar.
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