Tough Times For Spotify? Tiktok Owner Gives Competition!

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Popular short video app ‘Tiktok’ has taken India by storm with a massive user base of around 200 million. In fact, the vertical video format app has surged ahead of social media biggies like that of Facebook and Twitter. In order to make their presence felt more, Tiktok parent company ByteDance Inc. has begun testing a new music app in the emerging markets. This is probably an effort to accomplish another global service that would be a new sensation.

Resso Is Its Name 

The music app is called Resso and is available in India and Indonesia, two of Asia’s most populous countries, and nations where Tiktok has been immensely popular. The figures are on the higher side too. At the time of writing this report, Resso had been installed by about 27K users across the iOS App Store and Google Play. This data has been backed by Sensor Tower.

ByteDance – World’s Most Valuable Startup

Over the days, ByteDance has been working on developing the app, to provide stiff competition to Spotify and Apple Music, especially in countries where paid music services haven’t yet garnered audiences. ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing has secured rights from T-Series and  Times Music, as per national news sources.

However, there have been no reports of any rights deal with Warner Music Group Corp, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment. 

How Different Is Resso From Spotify?

The uniqueness of Resso is that it displays reak time lyrics and also lets users post their comments, against each song. Furthermore, users can generate music accompanied GIFs and videos, matching a feature of Tiktok. 

Resso comes with a monthly paid subscription of INR. 119 in India, which is the same as Spotify. The premium users of Resso have the advantage of downloading and listening to music ad-free. 

A Resso representative said in a statement that Resso is in a beta testing phase. They are also optimistic about its long term prospects, but they are still very early in the process and are present in a limited number of developing markets.

Valuation of ByteDance

Though ByteDance was currently valued at $75 billion last year, however, the seven-year-old startup is still on the verge of producing its major hit after Tiktok and news aggregator Toutiao. Seems that ByteDance is also looking forward to expand its revenue stream beyond advertising to a home economy.

Some Stats And Days Ahead

Statistics state that Tiktok has been launched nearly 1.5 billion times since its launch in 2017. In the US, users have grown up to 38 percent, to 11.6 million in the third quarter, from 8.4 million earlier, as per Sensor Tower.

With the launch and testing out of Resso in its already chosen markets, ByteDance has the room to scale up slowly, and might even hog the limelight yet again. Surely, this seems like a bullish market, however time would say whether or not ByteDance would turn out victorious in this highly competitive market. 

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