Apparently, Tiktok’s parent company, Bytedance, wants to offer its Resso music streaming service worldwide. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The streaming service will then be integrated into the short video app, the report says. However, it is unclear whether major music labels will perform.
Currently, Bytedance Resso’s music streaming service is only available in India, Indonesia and Brazil. It is planned according to the WSJ report, to open more than a dozen other markets. In the United States, however, that shouldn’t be the case for now. It is unclear whether Germany will be part of the next expansion phase. In the long run, however, it should be the case that Resso will compete around the world with top dogs like Spotify, Deezer, Amazon Music Unlimited, and Apple Music.
Tiktok-Integration
To do this, Bytedance wants to leverage Tiktok’s market position and integrate the service into the Tiktok app. Users can then discover the music there and also subscribe to a streaming subscription, according to the Bytedance plan. As it turns out, Bytedance focuses mainly on Tiktok’s young audience, who made some songs viral and put them on the music charts.
It is still unclear whether Bytedance’s plan will work. Discussions are currently underway with an unspecified music license holder. According to the WSJ, there were still differences of opinion here. In particular, the advertising-funded freemium offering raises the question of the level of financial participation of the labels. It is also unclear how much of the revenue from ad-free offering generally goes to labels.
In principle, Bytedance has to negotiate with all major music labels to get good coverage of their music catalog. Bytedance has already found that it’s not easy to convince music labels and keep them for the long term. The Sony Music Group popped up because in the three previous countries where Bytedance is active with Resso, there was hardly any money to be made. It is said that there were only a few paying users. Sony Music’s music titles are now missing from the catalog, making the service correspondingly less attractive.
The contracts of major music rights holders who had short-term deals with Tiktok to allow users to insert snippets of music into their videos have expired. However, different licenses apply here than a conventional music streaming service. However, Bytedance proved to be stingy with music snippet licensing and didn’t want to pay the usual market prices.
(olb)
