As parent company Bytedance prepares to launch its dedicated music-streaming service, TikTok has reached a new milestone. Well, it has according to research firm SensorTower, anyway. It claims that TikTok has now been downloaded more than 1.5bn times from Apple’s App Store and Android’s Google Play, including 614m downloads in 2019 alone. “It’s currently the third most downloaded non-gaming app of the year,” noted the company, with the rest of the top five all Facebook-owned apps.
There are also some estimates for individual countries’ TikTok downloads: 466.8m in India (around 31% of all installs, and 45% of those in 2019) followed by 173.2m in China. As SensorTower notes, these figures DON’T include downloads from non-Google Android app stores, so the real total will be higher.
SensorTower also estimates that users of the two official app stores have so far spent $175m within TikTok (on its virtual coins) including $115.3m in 2019 so far.
Talking of spending money and TikTok… the app is testing a new ‘social commerce’ feature allowing channels to add links in their bios, as well the ability to add links to online-shopping sites to videos. TechCrunch has the details of the new feature, which could be particularly interesting in markets like India, given those huge user figures.
Music Ally’s next Learn Live webinar will help you build the strategies for artists to thrive in new international markets!