The owner of TikTok is preparing competition for Spotify and Apple Music. The attraction should be the low price

In certain circles, the name Alex Zhu has been inflected in all cases lately. In 2014, this man was at the birth of the musical social network Musical.ly. If you are one of the lucky ones who missed this phenomenon completely, know that it is - simply put - a platform where users can upload short videos. Initially, you could find here mainly attempts to open their mouths to the sounds of popular songs, over time the creativity of users increased and on the network, which has since changed its name to TikTok, we can now find a fairly wide range of short videos on which mostly younger users sing, dance, perform skits and with more or less success try to be funny.

According to Zhu, the idea to create TikTok was born more or less by accident. On one of his train trips from San Francisco to Mountain View, California, Alex began to notice teenage fellow passengers. Most of them varied their trip by listening to music from their headphones, but also by taking selfies and lending each other their mobile phones. At that moment, Zhu thought that it would be great to combine all these elements into one single "multifunctional" application. It didn't take long for the Musical.ly platform to be born.

But the company ByteDance, which sponsors TikTok, obviously does not intend to stay with the current form of the application. According to a report from The Financial Times, the company is currently in talks with Universal Music, Sony and Warner Music about the possible creation of a streaming service based on a regular monthly subscription. The service could even see the light of day this December, initially being available in Indonesia, Brazil and India, and eventually expanding to the United States, which will be the company's most important market. The price of the subscription is not yet certain, but it is speculated that the service should come out cheaper than competitors Apple Music and Spotify, and it should also include a library of video clips.

But these news do not cause boundless enthusiasm. In the United States, ByteDance is under scrutiny by federal officials for its ties to China. Democratic Senator Chuck Shumer, for example, recently warned in his letter that TikTok could pose a potential threat to national security. The company stores user data on servers in Virginia, but the backup north is located in Singapore. However, Zhu denies that he is aligning his service to the Chinese government, and in one of the interviews he said without hesitation that if he was asked by the Chinese president to remove a video, he would refuse.

Source: BGR