Given how intertwined music discovery is with TikTok, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if the company launched its own music streaming app. Well, patent filings uncovered by Insider suggest that TikTok is working on just that.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, filed a trademark application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for “TikTok Music” in May. According to the documentation, the service will allow users to buy, play, share and download music. It will also allow users to create, share, and recommend playlists, comment on music, and stream live audio and video. ByteDance already filed to trademark “TikTok Music” in Australia last November.
ByteDance already has experience with music streaming. In 2020, ByteDance launched a music streaming app, Resso, in India, Brazil and Indonesia. Resso has some of the same features described in the “TikTok Music” documentation, such as the ability to create playlists, share songs on social media, and interact with the app’s community.
ByteDance is even using 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 users stay in the ByteDance ecosystem.
The information also reports that Resso has over 40 million monthly users in India, Brazil and Indonesia as of November 2021, a number that is likely to grow. Earlier this year, a report from Insider revealed that Resso’s monthly active users grew by 304 percent between January 2021 and January 2022 in India alone, in contrast to Spotify’s 38 percent growth in the country during the same period from time.
It’s not clear if ByteDance plans to develop a music streaming app based on the Resso framework, or if it will come up with something else entirely. Just as TikTok has had a profound impact on the way social media sites operate, it’s possible that a music streaming app with ties to TikTok could change the music streaming industry, forcing services to adapt.
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