Digitally China Podcast: Can TikTok Beat Spotify and Apple Music at the Streaming Game?

Digitally China is a bi-weekly podcast from RADII hosted by Tom Xiong and Eva Xiao, and produced by Jacob Loven. On each episode, the team will tackle a different timely tech-related topic, providing key insights on all you need to know about the fast-changing nature of innovation in China. Find previous episodes of Digitally China here and subscribe on iTunes here.

ByteDance, the company behind the huge international success TikTok, or Douyin as its called in China, is really on the offense. Fueled by the position of TikTok as the third most downloaded app in the world in 2018 and an overall valuation of 75 billion USD, ByteDance have recently both announced plans to launch their own smartphone and to enter messaging to directly compete with Tencent and Facebook.

And now, ByteDance seem to have advanced plans on getting into music streaming to compete with Spotify, Tencent Music and Apple Music. Already positioned among hundreds of millions of teens around the world with a short video and music app, this next move doesn’t actually seem as crazy as it might at first glance.

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Together with Jonas Leijonhufvud and Sven Carlsson, authors of a new book telling the inside story of Spotify and the fight for global dominance in music streaming, on the latest Digitally China we discuss whether ByteDance really have a shot at taking on the streaming giants.

In this episode we look at

• TikTok’s current position in the market
• The challenges of monetizing through music streaming, as discovered by Spotify and Apple Music
• How music streaming companies work with record labels and how that would impact TikTok’s ambitions
• The validity of TikTok’s presumed music streaming service and how their position among teenagers around the world could support that

Host Tom Xiong
Producer Jacob Lovén
Guests Jonas Leijonhufvud and Sven Carlsson, reporters at Dagens Industri and authors of the book Spotify Untold

Listen to the latest Digitally China episode below or find it (and previous episodes) on iTunes here.

Cover photo: Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash