Farewell, TikTok Music: The independent music streaming platform of the well-known video-sharing behemoth is now scheduled to shut down at the end of November.
The streaming service TikTok, owned by ByteDance, announced its closure with a statement and an update on the relevant website. The latter emphasizes how permanent the change is; according to the wording, users’ “personal data and account information will be automatically deleted following the closure of TikTok Music.”
Users can move their playlists to other services until October 28 and receive refunds for any unused subscription period until November 28. The specific cause(s) of the shutdown are not mentioned on the TikTok Music website. In a similar vein, Ole Obermann, the worldwide head of music business development at TikTok, announced the end of operations in a statement but gave little explanation for the choice.
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Longtime ByteDance/TikTok executive Obermann said, “Our Add to Music App feature has already enabled hundreds of millions of track saves to playlists on partner music streaming services.” In order to further TikTok’s role in promoting even greater music listening and value on music streaming platforms, for the benefit of artists, songwriters, and the industry, we will be discontinuing TikTok Music at the end of November.
But it’s possible that some kind of licensing issue—or at the very least, friction—influenced the choice. In 2022, TikTok announced its plans to provide standalone streaming, and even at that time, there were rumors that the majors were worried about how the service will be able to make money.
However, in the summer of 2023, the service took the place of ByteDance’s previous music app, Resso, in Brazil and Indonesia. It also came with lower monthly fees than Spotify, which charges the countries’ Individual users the equivalent of $4 and $3.60 a month, respectively.
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The platform quickly spread to Singapore, Australia, and Mexico. Looking back, it’s clear that the round of layoffs that affected the TikTok Music division the next month, in August 2023, wasn’t good for the service.
More recently, TikTok itself was involved in a licensing dispute with Universal Music only earlier in 2024. After a settled dispute that is now largely forgotten, UMG temporarily removed their inventory from TikTok.
Regardless of potential license issues that may arise in the background, TikTok Music’s withdrawal from the streaming market may simply be the result of low adoption rates and the significant resources needed to keep up the non-core offering. Naturally, there is fierce rivalry from services like SoundCloud, Deezer, Tidal, YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, and others.
Furthermore, TikTok continues to lead the way in music expansions (it added a Bandcamp channel last month) and faces much bigger challenges in averting a ban that is drawing near in the biggest economy in the world.
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