TikTok is tuning out the music streaming war, but they’re still playing the hits: TikTok is officially throwing in the towel on TikTok Music, a music streaming service that they hoped would rival Spotify and Apple music, reported Business Insider. After a yearlong struggle, parent company ByteDance is slated to shut down TikTok Music on 28 November.

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TikTok has proved a strong force in the music industry, with new songs going viral on the platform, and older songs getting a second wind, sometimes reliving their chart-topping glory days. This made the development of an app dedicated solely to music discovery a logical next step, but unfortunately, that’s not how the internet works.

But the music app couldn’t manage to crack the top charts in most countries where it launched. The app was first launched for testing in Indonesia and Brazil, where ByteDance had already seen success with Resso, a similar app. But the app barely grazed the leaderboard, ranking at 28 in Indonesia, and 71 in Brazil on each country’s App Store.

This might still be a win for ByteDance. TikTok Music might be dead, but the platform will be using its influence to partner with other streaming services like Spotify, Amazon Music, or Apple Music to drive up consumption. The company will be developing its Add to Music App feature, which will allow users to save a track they enjoyed on TikTok to their preferred music streaming service directly from the video they’re watching.

The messenger app announced a major change in its privacy terms yesterday, saying that they will be cooperating with law enforcement entities to provide the identifying information of users who violate their rules. CEO Pavel Durov, who was arrested in France last month for passively allowing “a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram,” posted that the platform would share the IP addresses and phone numbers of users who violate their rules “in response to valid legal requests” made from relevant authorities.

Their popular feature, Telegram Search, will also be seeing an operational overhaul. Telegram moderators have already started scouring the platform — which Durov insists “is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods” — to remove any material they found “problematic.” The CEO hopes that these safeguards will “discourage criminals,” who have no doubt benefited from Telegram’s history of refusing to cooperate with legal authorities.

Telegram has faced years of backlash for the availability of illegal and inappropriate content on the platform. Some channels, which were publicly available through Telegram Search, were affiliated with terrorists, used to help organize anti-immigrant riots in the UK, and spread harmful and intentional misinformation. Durov is currently facing up to 10 years in prison and a EUR 500k fine on allegations of the existence of drug trafficking, money laundering, and other criminal activities on Telegram.

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