After short video, Bytedance readies to disrupt music streaming

Music streaming space has been seeing a multifaceted war between apps for a while now. With Spotify entering the ecosystem and competing with Gaana, Wynk, JioSaavn etc. the competition was already on a tense scale.

Now, ByteDance, the largest valued private company in the world, is also working on a music streaming application, one similar to Spotify.

To understand what Bytedance is building, let's first understand what Spotify is. Unlike other streaming apps, Spotify is better known for its song recommendation algorithms, daily and weekly mixes and discovers.

The Swedish company's play goes beyond basic music streaming and deep into machine learning and AI.

Bytedance in itself is a $76 billion-valued company based in China, and highly relies on machine learning and is constantly working to develop and incorporate AI into its products.

TikTok, a video streaming entertainment app by the same company has been topping the global charts more often than not.

Currently, about 100 people are working on the music app, reveals South China Morning Post's sources.

The app is slated to be launched soon.

This is an important development globally, given the app is expected to give tough competition to current existing large players.

And in Indian context as well, this is equally important. Bytedance recently revealed its plans to invest $1 billion in India business, counting it as one of its largest markets.

TikTok got banned in India due to non-compliance of Indian policies like opening a local office as well as no regulation against the circulation of offensive content. Considering this, it looks like the new music streaming app could be one of the larger areas of investment in India.

As music streaming is still developing in India, and large global players like Spotify are still very fresh to native users, Bytedance will have a huge opportunity to cash on.

Not to forget, Chinese companies in India have been bullish on tier II and III cities. This segment, given the vast diversity of local music content to be catered to, is difficult to completely capture in an app and on top of it ensure the distribution to the right place.

If Bytedance, leveraging its size and accessibility to advanced technological resources, successfully manages to become the largest capturer of the segment, it might be able to bring a disrupt in the market. Rest, only time will tell.