With a billion users, TikTok has rapidly become one of the most important players in the music industry, and now has its sights set on revolutionising the way artists are discovered and get paid.
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TikTok recently launched a new rival to music-streaming giants Spotify and Apple Music, as the popular short video app seeks new avenues for growth.
TikTok Music said on Wednesday that it will be testing its service in Australia, Mexico and Singapore. That announcement comes shortly after it launched in Indonesia and Brazil earlier this month.
Last week, TikTok also announced an expanded licensing agreement with Warner Music Group, as it looks to grow its music content library. Parent company ByteDance also recently scrapped the free tier of Resso, another music-streaming service it owns.
While these efforts are in their early days, analysts said TikTok has key advantages that other music-streaming entrants do not possess and that could help it seize market share.
“There’s already this large installed base of users which TikTok can convert into paying TikTok Music subscribers – with a relatively low customer acquisition cost,” said Jonathan Woo, senior research analyst at Phillip Securities Research.
According to DataReportal, Indonesia and Brazil are TikTok’s second- and third-largest markets, behind only the U.S., with 113 million and 84.1 million active TikTok users aged 18 years and above, respectively. Meanwhile, Mexico is TikTok’s fourth-largest market with 62.4 million TikTok users.
There really is not that much incentive to switch services for users already on Spotify or Apple Music as brand loyalty amongst users on these premium incumbent platforms is also very strong.
Jonathan Woo
Senior analyst, Phillip Securities Research
“TikTok Music will make it easy for [users] to save, download and share their favorite viral tracks from TikTok,” Ole Obermann, global head of music business development for TikTok, said during the Indonesia and Brazil launch.
TikTok is the second-most common source of music discovery for 16 to 19 year olds, behind YouTube, according to data from MIDiA Research shared with CNBC. MiDIA Research is a U.K.-based research firm covering entertainment and media.
If you are already in the ecosystem, and you are using TikTok that much, you might be willing to switch over.
Tatiana Cirisano
Music analyst, MiDIA Research
In MiDIA’s fourth-quarter consumer survey, 48% of respondents said YouTube is among their main places for discovering music, while 41% pointed to TikTok. The survey fielded 9,000 respondents across the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, South Korea and Brazil.
“A lot of times people hear lots of different songs on TikTok, but they don’t make the jump to actually listen to it elsewhere or learn more about the artist,” said Tatiana Cirisano, music analyst at MiDIA Research.
“The powerful potential for TikTok Music is that it could close that gap,” said Cirisano.
Some market share
The music streaming market is currently dominated by Swedish giant Spotify and Apple Music.
Spotify commands almost 31% of the global streaming market with Apple Music following with 13.7%, according to the International Music Summit Business Report 2023.
But Cirisano said that heavy TikTok users could convert into TikTok Music users if they are using other services such as Spotify. “If you’re already in the ecosystem, and you’re using TikTok that much, you might be willing to switch over,” said Cirisano.
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Still, Woo of Phillip Securities Research said TikTok Music presents a “low risk” for Spotify and Apple Music.
“I do think that it would be quite difficult to surpass Spotify and Apple Music in terms of market share given their incumbency, but TikTok Music could definitely eat into some of it,” said Woo.
“There really is not that much incentive to switch services for users already on Spotify or Apple Music as brand loyalty amongst users on these premium incumbent platforms is also very strong,” said Woo.
He added that monthly subscription prices for all three services are expected to “be at similar price points.” In Indonesia, Spotify Premium costs 54,990 Indonesian Rupiah ($3.66) monthly while iOS users pay 49,000 Indonesia Rupiah ($3.26) a month for TikTok Music.
“As a consumer, why should I pay a monthly fee to listen on TikTok Music, when I can listen for free on Spotify, albeit with advertisements?”
TikTok declined to comment on TikTok Music’s expansion plans. Spotify and Apple Music did not respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Boost growth?
TikTok has been looking for growth outside the U.S., where it faces mounting political headwinds. Its flagship app was banned in Montana, the first state to do so, as well as India. TikTok’s CEO previously said the company will pour “billions of dollars” into Southeast Asia over the next few years.
The company’s e-commerce marketplace TikTok Shop has been aggressively expanding into Southeast Asia, competing against Sea‘s Shopee and Alibaba‘s Lazada. Those e-commerce efforts also include livestream shopping.
TikTok in July said livestream shopping isn’t the only area it is looking into when asked if it is the “end destination” for TikTok’s areas of expansion.
“Shoppertainment is not the only destination, but it is definitely one of the main areas, especially in Asia Pacific that we are leaning in heavily into,” Shant Oknayan, head of business across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa & Eastern Europe at TikTok, said during a summit in Jakarta earlier this month.
Mike Intrator, co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, speaks at the Nasdaq headquarters in New York on March 28, 2025.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
CoreWeave shares fell about 6% in extended trading on Tuesday even as the provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure beat estimates for second-quarter revenue
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: Loss of 21 cents
Revenue: $1.21 billion vs. $1.08 billion expected
Revenue more than tripled from $395.4 million a year earlier, CoreWeave said in a statement. The company registered a $290.5 million net loss, compared with a $323 million loss in second quarter of 2024. CoreWeave’s earnings per share figure wasn’t immediately comparable with estimates from LSEG.
CoreWeave’s operating margin shrank to 2% from 20% a year ago due primarily to $145 million in stock-based compensation costs. This is CoreWeave’s second quarter of full financial results as a public company following its IPO in March.
CoreWeave pointed to an expansion in business with OpenAI, a major client and investor. Also during the quarter, CoreWeave acquired Weights and Biases, a startup with software for monitoring AI models, for $1.4 billion.
In May, management touted 420% revenue growth, alongside widening losses and nearly $9 billion in debt. The stock still doubled anyway over the course of the next month.
CoreWeave shares became available on Nasdaq at the end of the first quarter, after the company sold 37.5 shares at $40 each, yielding $1.5 billion in proceeds. As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was trading at $148.75 for a market cap of over $72 billion.
A CoreWeave data center project with up to 250 megawatts of capacity is set to be delivered in 2026, the company said in the statement.
Executives will discuss the results and issue guidance on a conference call starting at 5 p.m. ET.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) invites Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to speak in the Cross Hall of the White House during an event on “Investing in America” on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
The Trump administration is still working out the details of its 15% export tax on Nvidia and AMD and could bring deals of this kind to more companies, the White House’s Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
“Right now it stands with these two companies. Perhaps it could expand in the future to other companies,” said Leavitt, the White House’s spokesperson.
“The legality of it, the mechanics of it, is still being ironed out by the Department of Commerce, and I would defer you to them for any further details on how it will actually be implemented,” she continued.
President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he had negotiated a deal with Nvidia in which the U.S. government approves export licenses for the China-specific H20 AI chip in exchange for a 15% cut of revenue. Advanced Micro Devices also got licenses approved in exchange for a proportion of its China sales, the White House confirmed.
“I said, ‘If I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release,'” Trump said Monday.
“We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets,” Nvidia said in a statement this week.
Trump said the export licenses for AMD and Nvidia were a done deal. But lawyers and experts who follow trade have warned that Trump’s deal may be complicated because of existing laws that regulate how the government can charge fees for export licenses.
The Commerce Department didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The H20 is Nvidia’s Chinese-specific chip that is slowed down on purpose to comply with U.S. export relations. It’s related to the H100 and H200 chips that are used in the U.S., and was introduced after the Biden administration implemented export controls on artificial intelligence chips in 2023.
Earlier this year, Nvidia said that it was on track to sell more than $8 billion worth of H20 chips in a single quarter before the Trump administration in April said that it would require a license to export the chip.
Trump signaled in July that he was likely to approve export licenses for the chip after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the White House.
The U.S. regulates AI chips like those made by Nvidia for national security reasons, saying that they could be used by the Chinese government to leapfrog U.S. capabilities in AI, or they could be used by the Chinese military or linked groups.
The Chinese government has been encouraging local companies in recent weeks to avoid using Nvidia’s H20 chips for any government or national security-related work, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum attend the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
China has told companies to refrain from using Nvidia‘s H20 chips after the chipmaker recently received approval to resume shipping the less advanced artificial intelligence product, Bloomberg reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Authorities have recently told companies to avoid using the Nvidia chips, or those from Advanced Micro Devices, for government and national security use cases, according to the news outlet.
The report comes after the White House confirmed on Monday that both Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give 15% of all China revenues to the U.S. government.
Last month, both companies said they would soon resume China shipments after the administration started requiring export licenses earlier this year. Both Nvidia’s H20 chip and AMD’s MI380 were created to work around previous AI chip restrictions to China due to national security fears.
Shares of both stocks teetered on Tuesday.
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During a press conference Monday, Trump called Nvidia’s H20 chip “obsolete” and said he wouldn’t allow the higher-end Blackwell shipments there without 30% to 50% decrease in performance.
China is a key market for AI chipmakers such as Nvidia and AMD.
Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said getting pushed out of the China market would be a “tremendous loss” for the company. He estimated the country’s AI market will hit $50 billion over the next two to three years.
Over the weekend, a social media account connected to Chinese state media said that the H20 chips were not “safe.”