Home > News

TikTok Music Service Could Be Next Byte Dance Project

By Laura Tucker
Tiktok Music App Patent Featured

Have you ever been watching TikTok videos and liked a song, then had to exit and find it on Spotify or Apple Music? You may be able to skip that extra step soon. According to a recently-filed patent, parent company ByteDance is interested in developing a TikTok music service. It seems like a very natural step for the social media app.

Also read: How to Add Two or More Songs to Your TikToks

The TikTok Music Patent

In May 2022, ByteDance applied for a trademark for “TikTok Music” with the US Patent and Trademark Office. It will entail options to “purchase, play, share, download music, songs, albums, lyrics.” In addition, TikTok Music will have options to “live stream audio and video,” “edit and upload photographs as the cover of playlists,” and “comment on music, songs, and albums.”

While this trademark application was submitted in May, the idea has been around much longer. Byte Dance applied for a trademark back in November in Australia, but the company already has a streaming app, “Resso,” in the India, Brazil, and Indonesia markets.

Tiktok Music App Patent Listening
Image source: Unsplash

Resso has been doing very well for the past year. A button was added to the TikTok app that allows Resso users to flip over to that service to hear the entire song. There were obvious plans to get users away from the free TikTok app and redirect them to the music subscription service. However, former Resso employees said that the Chinese-owned TikTok app was banned in India because of a political dispute between India and China.

Byte Dance has plans beyond a TikTok music service, too. The trademark listing includes an app that will allow users to “live stream audio and video interactive media programming in the field of entertainment, fashion, sports, and current events.”

Will TikTok Music Be Successful?

It makes sense not to dwell on the trouble in India and move into the lucrative markets of Australia and the U.S. as well as use the name “TikTok Music” to bank on the successful name. However, ByteDance will need to jump through other hoops in the U.S.

Tiktok Music App Patent Devices
Image source: Unsplash

ByteDance will need to show that it is using the trademark for the services mentioned on the application or intends to use it to sell a product to abide by trademark law. Because of that, “a company the size of TikTok or ByteDance is only going to file trademark applications for items that they’re seriously considering,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Law Firm.

“If you look back through any major company’s trademark filings, you’ll see ones that they filed that never came to fruition. But a lot of times they do. And a lot of times it’s something they’re seriously working on.”

Additionally, the FCC is trying to get the App Store and Google Play to drop the TikTok app for security reasons. It doesn’t seem like they would be any more inclined to want the TikTok Music service that will allow users to stick with the app longer.

Tiktok Music App Patent App Store

TikTok is going on to prove something I have often mentioned here in news articles – the cross-pollination of tech companies. Soon, they’ll all be offering the same services. They all seem to copy each other’s successes, sometimes fighting over it in court.

What will be interesting is how TikTok Music affects the other music services, such as Apple Music and Spotify. Right now, if you’re on TikTok and want to hear the full song, you move to one of the other apps to hear it. ByteDance’s plans will cause users to stick with TikTok.

Image credit: Unsplash Screenshot by Laura Tucker

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.