Blog: bytedance

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

DeepSeek and Rednote signal the dawning era of APAC

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Hanna Kahlert

29 Jan 2025

Business Strategy

The AI race is a tense one. Billions of dollars have been poured into the likes of OpenAI. Meanwhile, the US and UK governments, among others, have pledged to invest heavily in AI development, suggesting that they feel it is of critical importance to “win” the new space race.

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Are consumers ready for TikTok’s AI acceleration?

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Ben Woods

21 Nov 2024

The AI revolution sweeping the entertainment industry will rage on in 2025. In recent weeks, TikTok owner ByteDance has provided a deeper look into how AI will impact social platforms . Through a series of quick-fire announcements, it revealed TikTok’s AI tools for advertisers as well as separate creator features for building AI-powered chat bots.

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Epic blames layoffs on low creator margins — what does that mean for the rest of entertainment?

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Tatiana Cirisano

4 Oct 2023

Content Creators

Increasingly, engaging with entertainment involves some form of creation — be it turning your life into a Wes Anderson film , making songs with Grimes’ vocals , or learning the choreography to your new favourite music video .

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Will ByteDance build the first cultural graph for music recommendations?

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Tatiana Cirisano

11 Jul 2023

Music streaming

ByteDance’s long-awaited new subscription streaming app, TikTok Music, is here, with an initial launch in Indonesia and Brazil. The news overshadowed the US beta launch of ByteDance’s new music creation app, Ripple, which is likely to make waves.

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As Spotify's door closes on Soundtrap, another opens

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Tatiana Cirisano

16 Jun 2023

Music streaming

Writing about a new era of music fluidity last month, we noted how streaming services might align more closely with creation, as Spotify has done by acquiring music creation platform Soundtrap. Well, that vision for Spotify is no longer.

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A new era of music fluidity is here

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Tatiana Cirisano

23 May 2023

user-generated content

What do AI Drake, adaptive music, and TikTok open-verse challenges have in common? All reflect a major shift of music consumption from a passive, static, and uni-directional experience to an active, dynamic, multi-directional one.

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With its Australia experiment, TikTok gives the music industry the ultimate test

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Tatiana Cirisano

9 Feb 2023

independent music

Licensing negotiations between platforms and the music industry come down to one question: which side needs the other more? The more that TikTok needs hit music to attract users, the more leverage the music industry (meaning labels and publishers) gains.

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Could AI generate music’s Instagram moment?

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Tatiana Cirisano

31 Jan 2023

Music streaming

Pop quiz: Is the hit ‘Kill Bill’ sung by SZA or Ariana Grande? The answer is, of course, SZA, but TikTok users could be forgiven for any confusion. An artificial-intelligence-generated version sung in Grande’s voice has been circulating the platform, causing a frenzy.

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Is the net closing in on TikTok?

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Ben Woods

17 Jan 2023

There is nothing quite like a recession to seemingly transform disruptors into incumbents. As the focus moves from R&D spend to cost-cutting, the customer focus also changes. Efforts to acquire new customers lose their lustre when there is a need to hold onto those already engaged with a service.

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Apple connects the dots

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Tatiana Cirisano

31 Aug 2022

Music streaming

We are entering the era of the end-to-end music company. Companies are increasingly striving to capture more parts of the value chain by building end-to-end ecosystems that serve creators at all levels along every step, from music creation to distribution to marketing and beyond.

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What happens when content supersedes the creator?

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Tatiana Cirisano

25 Aug 2022

Creator economy

It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of the user interface looks like a TikTok feed. Companies from Meta to Spotify and Amazon have tested TikTok-like feeds that are focused on discovery, and even though Meta ended up rolling back some of its TikTok-inspired changes, its implementation of the format on Facebook and Instagram likely signals a wider shift to come.

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Is TikTok becoming a record label? The question misses the point

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Tatiana Cirisano

18 May 2022

Music streaming

Every time TikTok does anything that seems to hedge on record label territory, someone inevitably asks the question: is TikTok turning into a record label? Cue the eye-rolls from the music industry. No one seems to want to admit how powerful a music company competitor TikTok really is — to the point where becoming a record label is not the point at all.

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Newsflash: UMG, WMG and Spotify may have a problem with Tencent

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Mark Mulligan

7 Aug 2020

Tencent Music Entertainment

UPDATE: A White House official confirmed to the LA Times that the announcement, at this stage, will not affect Tencent shareholdings of companies and clarified that the order only refers to transactions 'related to' WeChat.

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We are at a turning point for social music

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Mark Mulligan

4 Aug 2020

In recent days we have seen three major developments that, collectively, are a potential pivot point for social music: 1. TikTok close to a US-entity buyout by Microsoft to avoid potential sanctions, following hot on the heels of an India blackout 2.

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Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) December 2nd 2019

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Mark Mulligan

2 Dec 2019

first order music

Bytedance / TikTok split: Bytedance appears to be getting nervy about the impact of Chinese censorship regulation on TikTok, to the extent that it is reportedly mulling spinning off the app as a separate company.

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Take Five (the big five stories and data you need to know) November 18th 2019

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Mark Mulligan

18 Nov 2019

Bytedance subscription: Bytedance, parent of TikTok, is reportedlyclose to launching a music subscription service, initially focused on emerging markets. The big question is whether Bytedance will get the deals to launch something genuinely new, built on TikTok’s foundation, or just end up launching a cookie-cutter “all you can eat” 9.

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Backing Both Horses: The Thinking Behind Tencent’s UMG Stake

Mark Mulligan

6 Aug 2019

As long expected, Tencent is poised to take a stake in Vivendi, reported to be 10%. While the news might not be surprising, there are a number of important factors at play: Tencent fast-tracked? Given that various entities stated their interest in investing in UMG, Vivendi appears to have fast-tracked Tencent.

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