Will Spotify and Apple Music meet their match?

TikTok continues its world domination after its parent company (ByteDance) filed a trademark application for the service, called “TikTok Music” in the US, back in May of this year.

Of course, this seems as no surprise as TikTok is the platform to discover new music. But did you know that ByteDance has already launched a music service in India, Brazil and Indonesia called Resso? It even managed to amass 40M monthly users across the 3 countries in November 2021. In India alone, its active users grew 304% from Jan 2021–2022, in comparison to just a 38% increase for Spotify.

ByteDance has described its music service to enable users to “purchase, play, share and download music”, letting users on the app “live stream audio and video interactive media programming in the field of entertainment, fashion, sports, and current events.”

What could this mean?

This is purely all speculative as it’s still early days, but we at Osaka think that the music app will coincide with TikTok (naturally), featuring all the major sounds and songs created on the app. Could this streamline the music marketing process for up-and-coming artists? Allowing them to share their work between the apps?

But could this take off? Spotify has reportedly acquired 422M unique users in Q1 of 2022, with 182M of them being premium members. Apple Music, the other relatively-new kid on the block, acquired 98M in 2021. It’s also worth mentioning that YouTube Music and Youtube Premium together have more than 50M subscribers globally.

But who knows? This could all be the start — what about something like TikTok Maps? After all, the platform’s already become the place to discover new places to go.