This week, ByteDance has decided to launch a music streaming media product in China during the second half of 2021. The product is currently in a critical development stage. The product name is tentatively designated “FeiYue’’ and the internal code name of the project is “luna’’. The project is currently being worked upon by the Douyin team.
The ByteDance music business is mainly composed of the front-end, the market middle platform, and the algorithm middle platform. The music front-office business is led by Alex (Jun Zhu), the VP of ByteDance Products and Strategy, and there are three who report directly to Alex.
Zhen Cao is responsible for overseas music platform Resso and the Music Library, Ole Bermann is responsible for foreign copyright business, and Yan Lu is responsible for the Chinese Domestic Music copyright cooperation business.
As for the middle platform, the Douyin market team is responsible for the cooperation with Chinese domestic musicians, copyrights, and publicity.
The algorithm team is responsible for providing technical support like the intelligent soundtrack and security risk control.
ByteDance began to explore the music business as early as 2019, and once launched a Chinese music streaming media project code-named “W”, which failed during the development phase due to massive lacking of copyrights and vague product positioning. The project was originally positioned as a music player platform but later transformed into a music community product due to its insufficient music copyrights, which was internally functional for about one year before it was terminated in 2020 due to narrow product positioning.
Generally, less than 10% of TikTok’s top1000 hit Chinese songs had complete playback copyright at the time. In addition, ByteDance launched the music streaming application Resso in India in March 2020.
In China, however, due to the long-term monopoly of the music copyrights market by Tencent, making it difficult for Bytedance to use its powers.
Compared to Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, the biggest advantage of ByteDance to survive in the music industry lies in its distribution. With Douyin as the distribution traffic, independent musicians who signed with ByteDance will have an advantage.
