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Why TikTok Music’s Failure Isn’t Surprising, and What It Says About Today’s Streaming Business
The digital music graveyard is littered with streaming products that didn’t last, so the failure of TikTok Music isn't surprising.
TikTok is great at creating engagement, too, but getting people to listen to full songs is different than feeding them a never-ending series of 15-second video clips, says Vickie Nauman, founder of CrossBorderWorks, a music tech and consulting and advisory firm. If new entrants are going to find success, says Mulligan, it could be in “regional hubs” in which streaming services can license a smaller amount of local music and focus on markets where Western repertoire is less important. Younger people want to create, not just consume, he says, and TikTok could become a self-contained ecosystem that captures more of its users’ time — at the expense of the kind of on-demand streaming business that Bytedance is now abandoning.
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