Sharing and saving music is in line with how consumers use TikTok, Forrester analysts said.

Just one year after its launch, TikTok’s audio streaming platform TikTok Music is shutting down today (November 28).

Addressing the shutdown in September, Ole Obermann, the company’s global head of music business development, said the social media company is shutting down its audio streaming platform to focus on “promoting TikTok’s role in listening to music more even more and add value to music streaming services”.

The Chinese-owned social media platform has a huge influence in pushing music streams – its music streaming platform should be set up for success.

The 2023 Music Impact Report revealed that TikTok users are significantly more likely to discover new music on the platform and share it globally, and that US users are twice as likely to discover new music on the app. While TikTok users in the UK spent 49pc more on music purchases compared to average listeners.

In 2021, 430 songs on the platform exceeded 1bn video views and more than 175 trending songs on the platform reached the Billboard Hot 100.

Last year, the platform even partnered with Billboard to create its own ‘TikTok Billboard Top 50’ chart.

However, the Byte-Dance-owned company, known more for its short-form video sharing than music streaming, has been unable to combat consumer behavior – which prefers established services such as YouTube and Spotify a lot.

However, the audio streaming platform has had some obstacles along the way.

TikTok Music first launched in Brazil and Indonesia – two of its biggest markets – in July last year, allowing users to sync the new service with their existing TikTok accounts to listen to, download and share songs to share.

However, competing against rival services like Spotify and YouTube, TikTok Music, with a focus on emerging markets, was only made available in five countries, which, after launching in Indonesia and Brazil, expanded to Australia, Singapore and Mexico.

And around the same time, the Byte-Dance-owned audio streaming platform Resso – which was eventually rebranded to TikTok Music – launched in 2019, and was only available in Brazil, Indonesia and India. slowly phase out, with the service closing completely at the end of the year. January of this year.

Resso was kicked out of the last surviving market in India after orders from the Indian government, which already banned TikTok in the country in 2020.

“Unfortunately, due to local market conditions, we can no longer continue to serve Resso users in India,” a ByteDance spokesperson told Billboard in January. “Therefore we have taken the decision to close Resso and the associated operations”.

Also around the end of January, Universal Music Group, a major record label that licensed his music to TikTok pulled out of the platform after a dispute related to its licensing agreement, taking his music with it.

The record label, in an open letter of resolution against TikTok, accused the platform of trying to build a music-based business without paying “fair value” for the music and sponsoring “replacement” artists with AI.

However, the two reached an agreement in May with a new “multi-dimensional” license that sought to better reward Universal Music artists and songwriters.

But TikTok Music – designed in the same way as its competitors, was unable to compete with established streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music.

Explaining why TikTok Music failed, Forrester principal analyst Kelsey Chickering said, “It’s hard to fight inertia.

“To change consumer behavior based like this, TikTok would have to offer something much more valuable than what YouTube and Spotify have already created.”

In addition, Spotify and YouTube are also popular in Australia – one of the countries that TikTok Music wanted to tackle.

According to Forrester’s 2023 Consumer Benchmark Survey, 47pc of Australian online adults used YouTube at least once a week, while 45pc said the same for Spotify. In a distant third place, Apple Music received 10pc of adult usage.

Simply put, TikTok Music doesn’t seem to have offered enough for consumers to want to jump ship.

However, the platform’s approach to integrating music from other platforms into itself seems to be more in line with consumer behavior, Chickering said.

“TikTok’s ‘Share to TikTok’ and ‘Add to music’ features are aligning better with consumer behavior,” Chickering said.

The app’s ‘Share to TikTok’ feature, released earlier this month, allows users to share audio content from Apple Music and Spotify directly to TikTok, while the ‘Add to music app’ feature released last year allows users can save tracks they find on TikTok to their favorite streaming service.

Initially launched in the US and UK, the service is now available to users in 163 countries.

“Sharing and saving music has always been central to how people have used TikTok, and these features, which leverage partnerships with streaming apps, naturally support that behavior,” added Chickering.

And Obermann, launching the new feature, said that the “Add to music app” was already responsible for “hundreds of millions of track saves and billions of streams” on TikTok’s partner music streaming services.

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