It’s been long overdue and it will not come as a huge surprise that TikTok will soon launch a music streaming app of its own. Well, patent filings uncovered by Insider suggest TikTok’s working on just that. This will put the company in direct competition with the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer.
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This comes after TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, filed a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for “TikTok Music” in May. According to the filing, the service would let users purchase, play, share, and download music. It would also allow users to create, share, and recommend playlists, comment on music, and live stream audio and video. ByteDance already filed for a “TikTok Music” trademark in Australia last November.
It’s not the first time ByteDance is dipping its toes into the music streaming business. In 2020, ByteDance launched a music streaming app, Resso, in India, Brazil, and Indonesia. So it comes as no surprise that Resso has some of the same features described in the “TikTok Music” filing, such as the ability to create playlists, share songs on social media, and interact with the app’s community. ByteDance even uses TikTok to bring existing users to Resso.
According to a report from The Information, the TikTok app in Brazil comes with a button that redirects users to Resso so they can listen to the full version of a song they’re interested in, a move that helps keep users within the ByteDance ecosystem.
Resso had over 40 million monthly users across India, Brazil, and Indonesia as of November 2021, a number that’s likely to grow after it’s rolled out globally. Earlier this year, a report from Insider revealed that Resso’s monthly active users grew by 304 percent between January 2021 to January 2022 in India alone, as opposed to Spotify’s 38 percent growth in the country during the same period of time.
