TikTok Music

» see music.tiktok.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

TikTok Music launched in July 2023 in Brazil and Indonesia. On 19 July it added Australia and Mexico in closed beta, with Singapore joining the same round, and all of them went public on 19 October. That is the full list. It never launched in the United States, never in Europe, never anywhere the major labels do most of their business.

The product was a paid subscription streaming app with licensed catalog from all three major label groups. You could listen, download for offline, and import your playlists in from other services. What made it different on paper was the hookup to TikTok itself: hear a clip in the feed, land on the full song in the app that was already on your phone. ByteDance had the shortest possible path from discovery to play and it built a store at the end of it.

The app it replaced was Resso, which ByteDance had run since 2020. Resso was the interesting one, a lyrics-forward social music app with comment threads on individual tracks, and India was its biggest market until the country banned it in 2023. TikTok Music inherited the Brazilian and Indonesian users and dropped most of the personality.

~ the record ~

~ the math that closed it ~

ByteDance announced the shutdown on 24 September 2024 and gave subscribers until 28 November. Playlists had to be exported by 28 October, refunds requested by the closing day, and renewals were cancelled automatically. Sixteen months, five countries, done.

The explanation the company gave is the unusual part. TikTok said it would rather push listeners toward Spotify and Apple Music than compete with them, and there is real logic in that. A label negotiating with TikTok over licensing rates has a much weaker hand when TikTok is purely the thing that makes their songs into hits, and a much stronger one when TikTok is also a subscription service taking the same subscribers. Killing the store made the feed more valuable.

~ what five countries means ~

Indonesia and Brazil are the two markets where TikTok's own numbers are enormous and where the incumbent streamers were still fighting for paying users rather than defending a lead. The other three look like a test spread rather than a rollout. A service that reaches five countries in sixteen months and stops was being evaluated the whole time, not built.

Turkey never saw it, and neither did anyone I could have compared notes with. TikTok itself is completely normal here and the music app attached to it was a thing you could only read about in coverage of other people's app stores. It is a strange category of dead product: globally famous parent company, product almost nobody on earth actually used.

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