TikTok owners to launch new music streaming service

The owners of TikTok reportedly have made plans to launch a new music streaming service in China.

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ByteDance, who own the popular video app, are set to launch the new service, which currently goes by the name Feilo, later this year.

According to Chinese outlet 36Kr, work on the app began in 2019, and is the brainchild of Alex Zhu, ByteDance’s Vice President of Product and Strategy.

The reported development of Felio comes just one year after ByteDance’s launch of another music streaming platform in India called Resso. It was set up to rival streaming giants Spotify.

Elsewhere, this month it was revealed that TikTok is now watched on average longer than YouTube by users in both the UK and US, according to a new report.

According to app monitoring firm App Annie, the average time per user spent on the apps is higher for TikTok, indicating high levels of engagement.

YouTube retains the top spot for overall time spent on apps – not per user – as it has more users overall than TikTok, with an estimated two billion monthly users – TikTok has somewhere around 700 million.

Earlier this summer, TikTok responded to criticism from a comedian which claimed that phrases including ‘Black Lives Matter’ and “Black success” were banned from the platform.

Ziggi Tyler recently called out TikTok in videos showing that the app allowed words including “neo-Nazi”, “pro-white” and “white supremacist” to be included in the bios of content creators on the app’s Creator Marketplace.

The videos went on to show that terms including “pro-Black”, “Black Lives Matter”, “Black success” and “Black people” were flagged as being inappropriate or banned.

In response to the controversy, TikTok shared a statement with Forbes. It read: “Our TikTok Creator Marketplace protections, which flag phrases typically associated with hate speech, were erroneously set to flag phrases without respect to word order.”

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