TikTok has become a force in the music industry, driving new hits through video trends and pushing old tracks to the top of the song charts. Now, it's using that influence to kick-start its own music-streaming app, TikTok Music.
The company's new app is currently only available to users in Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, and Singapore.
Insider signed up for an early look at the Singapore version that's being tested in a closed beta.
After spending hours exploring the platform, we found TikTok has leaned heavily into some of the same features that made its video app popular.
Like TikTok's interface, TikTok Music includes a "For You" feed of recommended content. It also incorporates social features, such as the ability to comment on songs and react to what other users are saying. This sets it apart from leading streamers like Spotify and Apple Music, which have limited in-app social features.
"We find in our consumer surveys that younger consumers are more interested in having a more social streaming experience," Tatiana Cirisano, a music-industry analyst and consultant at the research firm MIDiA Research, told Insider. "Spotify is starting to offer more things in that vein, but I just see it as an opportunity that's ripe for TikTok's taking."
TikTok may also be uniquely positioned to capture younger users as they start to enter the marketplace.
"If they've grown up with TikTok before they are actually spending money on any subscriptions, and then TikTok Music is out there, that could be pretty scary for Spotify and some of these other players if they're thinking about the next generation," Cirisano said.
It's still very early days for TikTok Music, and its rivals have a big headstart — Apple Music and Spotify are each in more than 100 countries.
But other relative newcomers like YouTube Music have shown there's room to break into music streaming, particularly for platforms that can leverage another popular app to drive sign-ups. YouTube reached 73 million music subscriptions in Q4 2022, up from 23 million three years earlier, per data compiled by MIDiA.
TikTok has not yet said when TikTok Music will roll out to other countries including the US. A spokesperson told Insider in July it will have "more news to share" on that front in the coming months.
In our tour of the app in Singapore, we found TikTok Music stood out from its peers with unique social features and a Shazam-style song identifier.
Yet, we felt TikTok Music's "For You" song recommendations in its discovery feed missed the mark — a surprising deficiency given its sister app is known for having an industry-leading content-recommendation algorithm — although the music app did excel at making song mixes.