The music streaming market is mainly dominated by two American and Swedish giants, Apple Music and Spotify. Soon, these giants might have a new competitor from China, and that’s TikTok Music.
The Chinese video-sharing app is reportedly planning to launch a music streaming service to take on Apple and Spotify. TikTok has already shown it’s not afraid of competition and ready to take every risk to enter new business segments. The ByteDance-owned app hopes to turn a portion of its massive user base (1.67 billion users) into TikTok Music subscribers.
TikTok Music is a big blow to Apple and Spotify. The Chinese app will collaborate with major record labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music, to enrich its portfolio. The service is currently available in Brazil is Indonesia, but it might expand to the US and Europe markets this year.
TikTok Music is here to battle Apple Music and Spotify
All music streaming services work similarly, and TikTok Music is no exception. You can listen to your favorite songs and then add them to your library for future listening. But TikTok Music has a feature that gives it a competitive advantage over Apple Music and Spotify.
The app features song recommendations and personalized curation to help users find trending songs on videos. Moreover, TikTok Music allows importing music libraries from other platforms, creating collaborative playlists, and finding a song by searching for lyrics. These features will make the app more appealing to TikTok’s young user base.
TikTok Music also comes with a song identification feature. This is similar to Apple’s Shazam. Another app feature is the ability to comment on songs and albums, aligning with the main app’s socialization purpose. Finally, TikTok Music will let users find song suggestions by scrolling vertically.
Brazilian and Indonesian customers currently use TikTok Music for $3.49 a month. An Apple Music subscription costs exactly the same amount in these countries.
TikTok already told BR that its goal is to combine “the power of music discovery on TikTok with a best-in-class streaming service.” The plans for US and EU release are yet to be determined by the company. The rising tensions in US-China relations and US lawmaker’s efforts to ban TikTok’s main app in the country over national security concerns might make the company think twice before expanding to the Western markets.