hat do fledgling singers, record label marketing departments and global superstars like Beyoncé and Mick Jagger have in common? They all believe that TikTok represents the future of the music industry. The Chinese-owned video-sharing and social media app is viewed by many people in the music world as having the same revolutionary potential as the CD or the digital download in decades gone by. It’s no surprise, then, that you can hear industry-wide shudders as the prospect of state-enforced TikTok bans creeps up the news agenda.
It sounds absurd – banning a smartphone app that shows video clips of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny playing baseball or the Rolling Stones singer doing DIY (Jagger joined TikTok earlier this year). But fears about security abound. Some politicians worry that behind TikTok’s innocent videos lies an agenda of secretive data harvesting by the Chinese government. The European Commission and the US and Canadian governments have already banned officials from using the app on government-issued devices. In early March, a powerful US committee of lawmakers backed legislation that could give President Joe Biden the power to ban the social video app for its estimated 100 million US users. The Republican chair of the US House foreign affairs committee Michael McCaul described TikTok – a division of Chinese company called ByteDance – as a “spy balloon on your phone”, referring to the Chinese surveillance balloon that was recently shot down off the US coast. India has already banned TikTok.