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Sharing and saving music aligns better with how consumers use TikTok, a Forrester analyst said.
Merely a year after it was launched, TikTok’s audio streaming platform TikTok Music is shutting down today (28 November).
Addressing the closure in September, the company’s global head of music business development Ole Obermann said that the social media company is closing its audio streaming platform to focus on “furthering TikTok’s role in driving even greater music listening and value on music streaming services”.
The Chinese-owned social media platform has a huge influence in pushing music streams – which should have set its music streaming platform up for success.
It’s 2023 Music Impact Report revealed that globally, TikTok users are significantly more likely to discover and share new music on the platform, with US users being twice as more likely to find new music on the app. While TikTok users in the UK spent 49pc more on music purchases when compared to average listeners.
In 2021, 430 songs on the platform exceeded 1bn video views while more than 175 trending songs on the platform made it to the Billboard Hot 100.
Last year, the platform even partnered with Billboard to create its own ‘TikTok Billboard Top 50’ chart.
However, the Byte-Dance-owned company, which is known more for its short-form video sharing than for streaming music, was simply unable to fight consumer behaviour – who vastly preferred already established services such as YouTube and Spotify.
Even so, the audio streaming platform had some hiccups along the way.
TikTok Music was first launched in Brazil and Indonesia – two of its biggest markets – in July last year, allowing users to sync the new service to their existing TikTok accounts to listen, download and share songs.
However, competing against rival services like Spotify and YouTube, TikTok Music, with a focus on emerging markets was only made available in five countries, which, after being launched in Indonesia and Brazil, expanded to Australia, Singapore, and Mexico.
While around the same time Byte-Dance owned audio streaming platform Resso – which eventually rebranded to TikTok Music – was launched in 2019, and only available in Brazil, Indonesia and India was slowly being discontinued, with the service closing down entirely at the end of January this year.
Resso was kicked out of its last surviving market in India after orders from the Indian government, who had already banned TikTok in the country in 2020.
“Unfortunately, owing to local market conditions, we can no longer continue to serve users of Resso in India,” a ByteDance spokesperson told Billboard in January. “We have therefore taken the decision to shut down Resso and its associated operations”.
Also around the end of January, Universal Music Group, a major record label which licensed its music to TikTok pulled out of the platform following a dispute around its licensing agreement, taking its music along with it.
The record label, in a castigating open letter against TikTok, accused the platform of trying to build a music-based business without paying “fair value” for the music and for sponsoring the “replacement” of artists by AI.
However, the two came to an agreement in May with a new “multidimensional” license which sought to deliver better remuneration for Universal Music artists and songwriters.
But TikTok Music – designed similarly to its competitors, was unable to compete with established streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Music.
Forrester principal analyst Kelsey Chickering, who explained why TikTok Music wasn’t successful, said that “It’s hard to fight inertia.
“To shift consumer behaviours that are this established, TikTok would have to offer something significantly more valuable than what YouTube and Spotify already created.”
Moreover, Spotify and YouTube are also popular in Australia – one of the countries TikTok Music was trying to penetrate.
According to Forrester’s Consumer Benchmark Survey from 2023, 47pc of Australian online adults used YouTube at least weekly, while 45pc said the same for Spotify. While at a distant third place, Apple Music secured 10pc of adult usage.
Simply put, TikTok Music did not seemingly offer enough for consumers to want to jump ship.
However, the platform’s approach to integrate music from other platforms into itself seems to align better with consumer behaviour, Chickering said.
“TikTok’s ‘Share to TikTok’ and ‘Add to music app’ features align better with consumer behaviour,” said Chickering.
The app’s ‘Share to TikTok’ feature, released earlier this month allows users to share audio content from Apple Music and Spotify to TikTok directly, while the ‘Add to music app’ feature released last year allows users to save a track they discover on TikTok to their a preferred streaming service.
Initially launched in the US and UK, the service is now available for users in 163 countries.
“Sharing and saving music is core to how people have always used TikTok, and these features, which leverage partnerships with streaming apps, naturally enhance that behaviour,” Chickering added.
While Obermann, at the launch of the new feature said that the “’Add to music app’ has already been responsible for hundreds of millions of track saves and billions of streams” on TikTok’s partner music streaming services.
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