ByteDance said it is shuttering its music streaming service, TikTok Music, in November.
“We are sorry to inform you that TikTok Music will be closing on 28 November 2024,” a notice on TikTok Music’s website reads. The service was available in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico.
Subscribers can continue to use the service until November 28, after which renewals will be automatically canceled, the notice said. Users who want to transfer their playlists to other streaming services will need to do so by October 28, and refund requests need to be submitted by November 28.
“Our Add to Music App feature has already enabled hundreds of millions of track saves to playlists on partner music streaming services. We will be closing TikTok Music at the end of November in order to focus on our goal of furthering TikTok’s role in driving even greater music listening and value on music streaming services, for the benefit of artists, songwriters, and the industry,” Ole Obermann, global head of Music Business Development, TikTok, said in a statement.
TikTok said that it will continue partnering with music streaming services rather than competing with them. In February, the company launched the “Add to Music” feature on TikTok that lets users add tracks directly to a playlist on Apple Music, Amazon Music, or Spotify.
TikTok Music was rooted in a ByteDance product called Resso, which was first launched in India and Indonesia in 2019 and later expanded to Brazil.
In 2023, ByteDance rebranded Resso to TikTok Music in Brazil and Indonesia, and soon after expanded it to Singapore, Australia, and Mexico. Resso was banned early this year in India.
TikTok has become a popular way for people to discover music and serves as a launchpad for artists, driving their streams. TikTok has a significant impact on increasing value for artists via streaming and fueling music discovery, per a study conducted by TikTok and entertainment data research firm Lumiate.
ByteDance, which also owns a music distribution platform called SoundOn, likely wanted to bank on TikTok’s popularity to drive streams within its own ecosystem, but the service didn’t expand internationally beyond a few markets.
TikTok also has had a shaky relationship with the music industry lately. Earlier this year, Universal Music Group (UMG) pulled its music catalog out of the service after disagreements over royalties. In response, TikTok called out UMG for “false narrative and rhetoric.” In March, both parties called a truce and signed a new deal.
Separately, TikTok is fighting a case against a bill that would possibly lead to the short video app being banned in the U.S. This might have hampered ByteDance’s plans of expanding TikTok Music to markets like the U.S.
Launching a phone company is a remarkably difficult — some even say foolish — thing to do. OSOM Products, which rose out of the smoldering ashes of Essential in 2020, is closing shop. Android Authority was first to report the news, after gaining access to an internal announcement from CEO Jason Keats.
OSOM always had a difficult road, with plans to launch a privacy-focused handset. And much like Essential before it, the company dealt with its own legal struggles — namely a lawsuit against filed by a former employee alleging financial mismanagement.
For its part, the company did manage to release a mobile device, though not the first-party phone it had announced. Rather the company lent its technology to a Web3 focused devices from Solana.
OSOM did manage to bring a product to market under its own name. The OSOM Privacy Cable is effectively a USB cord whose data transfer can be disabled in situations where “juice jackers” might be present.
“The report in Android Authority is correct, OSOM is sadly shutting down. In May of 2024, having no customers for a mobile phone despite concerted efforts, OSOM at the time decided to pivot to a new project,” CEO Jason Keats said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “OSOM was forced to let go of a number of employees at that time to reduce our burn rate.”
The “new project” would appear to refer to an “AI-powered camera” it planned as a followup to its unreleased smartphone. According to initial reports, Keating had attempted to sell the company off to HP, but was unable to strike a deal.
“Unfortunately, given the bleak market climate for fundraising for consumer electronics startups, we were unable to raise a new round,” Keats says. “While some maintenance operations to ensure contractual requirements will proceed, OSOM’s general operations will shut down on September 6.”
The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is ceasing operations after its last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed.
Despite securing over $60 million in funding from prominent investors, including Accel and Tiger Global, Koo faced significant challenges in expanding its user base and generating revenue over the past two years.
TechCrunch exclusively reported in February that Koo was engaging with Dailyhunt, an internet media startup valued at $5 billion, for a potential sale. The talks didn’t materialize into a deal, Koo founders said Wednesday.
“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” Koo founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Most of them didn’t want to deal with user generated content and the wild nature of a social media company.”
Koo sought to win users in India by giving them an X-like platform where they could express themselves in multiple local languages. Koo initially gained popularity in India during a period of tension between Twitter and the Indian government. The conflict emerged after Twitter challenged the government’s opaque requests for content removal.
Last year Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey alleged that the Indian government had threatened to shut down the social network in the country and raid the homes of its employees. (The Indian government refuted Dorsey’s allegations and a top minister at the time said Dorsey was attempting to “brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.”)
Koo took advantage of the situation and positioned itself as a more compliant alternative, pledging to adhere to local regulations. This approach attracted numerous high-profile Indian politicians to the platform, though nearly none from the opposition party. The startup had also expanded its eponymous app to Brazil.
But a prolonged funding winter, which forced startups globally to scale their revenue and improve their finances, “got the better of us,” Koo founders said.
For years, Indian entrepreneurs and investors have raced to create homegrown alternatives to popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube. It’s becoming increasingly evident that these established American companies are demonstrating superior capability in serving even the most diverse segments of the Indian market.
The Indian social media platform Koo, which positioned itself as a competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is ceasing operations after its last-resort acquisition talks with Dailyhunt collapsed.
Despite securing over $60 million in funding from prominent investors, including Accel and Tiger Global, Koo faced significant challenges in expanding its user base and generating revenue over the past two years.
TechCrunch exclusively reported in February that Koo was engaging with Dailyhunt, an internet media startup valued at $5 billion, for a potential sale. The talks didn’t materialize into a deal, Koo founders said Wednesday.
“We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted,” Koo founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Most of them didn’t want to deal with user generated content and the wild nature of a social media company.”
Koo sought to win users in India by giving them an X-like platform where they could express themselves in multiple local languages. Koo initially gained popularity in India during a period of tension between Twitter and the Indian government. The conflict emerged after Twitter challenged the government’s opaque requests for content removal.
Last year Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey alleged that the Indian government had threatened to shut down the social network in the country and raid the homes of its employees. (The Indian government refuted Dorsey’s allegations and a top minister at the time said Dorsey was attempting to “brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history.”)
Koo took advantage of the situation and positioned itself as a more compliant alternative, pledging to adhere to local regulations. This approach attracted numerous high-profile Indian politicians to the platform, though nearly none from the opposition party. The startup had also expanded its eponymous app to Brazil.
But a prolonged funding winter, which forced startups globally to scale their revenue and improve their finances, “got the better of us,” Koo founders said.
For years, Indian entrepreneurs and investors have raced to create homegrown alternatives to popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube. It’s becoming increasingly evident that these established American companies are demonstrating superior capability in serving even the most diverse segments of the Indian market.
Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3.5 billion in assets under management, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds. The move was unexpected considering that the firm announced a $500 million fund last year.
Boulder, Colorado-based Foundry first announced that its current fund would be its last on January 19. The venture firm had been investing since 2007, according to Crunchbase, and had announced the $500 million fund, Foundry 2022 — its eighth — in May of 2023.
Over the years, Foundry has invested in more than 200 companies and nearly 50 venture firms, according to co-founder and partner Seth Levine. It had backed the likes of Fitbit, Zynga and AvidXchange, among others.
The firm maintains the decision was the plan all along. When TechCrunch reached out to Levine, he declined to directly comment on the firm’s decision to shutter, and instead pointed to blogs he’d written.
In one blog, he acknowledged that the firm’s decision to completely shut down was an unusual one.
He wrote: “While VC firms rarely make decisions like this, it’s precisely what we planned to do when we started Foundry in 2006. From our founding, we intentionally decided not to build a legacy or generational firm — one meant to live beyond the tenure of the founding partners. Instead, we intended to focus on the work of investing, re-evaluating each potential new fund as our fundraising cadence required…We’ve had several moments over the last decade where we thought the fund we were raising might be our last. Each of those times, after reflection and discussion, we decided to raise another fund. But not this time. Foundry 2022 will be our last fund.”
In a personal blog, Levine noted that he began sharing publicly in January of 2023 his plan for the 2022 Foundry fund to be his “last as a partner at Foundry.”
He added: “I didn’t make a big announcement about it – just started mentioning it in situations where it seemed natural to do so…At the time, I wasn’t sure if we would make the same decision for Foundry as a whole, but since I knew my intentions, I thought it would be appropriate to be open about it. After more discussions internally and careful consideration, we decided that the 2022 fund would be Foundry’s final fund as well.”
Levine continued: “Choosing not to be a legacy firm is one way we’ve challenged norms in the venture industry and just one of many things we take pride in as we reflect back upon our time building Foundry. We’ve loved experimenting with the venture model, whether that was building the first VC AngelList syndicate, investing in markets across the country where venture capital was less prevalent, being among the first GPs to institutionalize a fund investment practice, and attempting to bring transparency, openness (and hopefully some humor) to the venture industry.”
What’s next
Foundry still has 33% to 40% left out of that fund to invest, Levine told the Denver Business Journal. In his blog, Levine said specifically the firm plans to “continue to lead Series A and B financings” out of the fund.
The move raises questions for its portfolio companies. Foundry says it will continue to invest out of its newest fund, but for founders, accepting capital from a firm that is winding down is a risk and could make securing follow-on funding that much harder.
Meanwhile, Levine maintained to the Denver Business Journal that he expects all the funds to be deployed by around 2026 and that the firm will then “still work with businesses in which it has investments.”
In his personal blog, Levine wrote: “We raised our last Foundry fund at a fortuitous time, just as the markets cooled off (it’s a great time to be investing), and we have another two years or so of new investments to look forward to. Not to mention a decade or longer of work with the portfolio after that.”
The investor also told the Denver Business Journal that he would “be with Foundry until its work is completely done,” adding that co-founder Brad Feld and partner Chris Moody “plan to do the same.” He could not say what the other partners would “get up to in the next few years.”
In her own blog post Foundry partner Jaclyn Hester wrote that she was “focused on supporting our portfolio and leading new early-stage rounds as we deploy the remainder of the 2022 fund over the next few years.”
Foundry is not the only venture firm to recently unexpectedly announce it was winding down. In December, Boston-based OpenView abruptly announced it would stop investing in new companies less than a year after raising $570 million for its seventh fund.
Update: This article was updated post-publication to reflect there no departures at the firm as a result of the decision – voluntary or otherwise, according to Levine. It also was updated to include further details behind the firm’s decision not to raise any more funds.
Google is shutting down its Podcasts app in the U.S. in a matter of days. The company has begun warning the app’s users they will need to migrate their subscriptions to YouTube Music by April 2 to follow and stream their favorite shows going forward. Users who don’t make the move immediately will still have additional time to migrate, but will no longer be able to stream from the Podcasts app directly after this date.
The Google Podcasts app, installed over 500 million times on Android devices globally, for over half a decade has offered a simple and streamlined interface for discovering, following and listening to podcasts, as well as tools to add podcasts by RSS feed. Unfortunately for fans of the app, the tech giant said last September it would begin to wind down the Podcasts app in early 2024 as part of its broader plan to centralize its audio services under YouTube.
In 2020, YouTube Music offered a similar transition strategy to move music listeners away from Google Play Music ahead of its shutdown that same year. However, the Google Podcasts app continued to be maintained for years because YouTube Music wasn’t ready to support podcasts until more recently. By the end of 2023, YouTube Music was able to support podcasts globally, and, by February, they had the ability to upload their RSS feeds, too.
The move to shift podcasting over to YouTube could help Google become a bigger player in the space, not only by combining its efforts and sharpening its focus, but also because interest in video podcasts — which were already popular on YouTube — is on the rise. This week, for example, Spotify forged a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG) to bring video podcasts to U.S. users of its streaming app after earlier in March announcing tests of video podcasts in 11 other markets around the world.
Bleeping Computer was the first to notice the shutdown date for Google Podcasts in the U.S., and a support page on Google’s site confirms that users in the U.S. will only be able to use the Podcasts app through the end of March 2024. For those who miss the in-app pop-ups, Google will offer users additional time to save their subscriptions by allowing them to use the app’s export feature through July 2024.
Google did not immediately return a request for comment, but after publication did respond to say that while it was still “tracking towards” the April 2 timeline for the U.S., it has not shared a timeline for the rest of the world yet.
From its earlier statements, though, the plan is to discontinue Google Podcasts globally in 2024.
After spat with TikTok, UMG expands Spotify partnership to include music videos and more
Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter in that story. TechCrunch has learned that Meta is shuttering Workplace, a version of Facebook that had been built to enable communication among business teams and wider organizations.
We have reached out to the company for comment but our sources tell us that the company plans to make an official announcement later today. The sources say that it will be business as usual on the platform until the start of September 2025 (specifically August 25). Then, it will be read-only until May 2026. Then, the service will be completely decommissioned.
According to a memo to Workplace customers, the company is is recommending Zoom-owned Workvivo as a migration-ready alternative. Workvivo, another enterpise communication platform, was acquired by Zoom in 2023. We have the full Meta memo below.
It’s not clear yet how many employees will be impacted by the closure.
Update: “We are discontinuing Workplace from Meta so we can focus on building AI and metaverse technologies that we believe will fundamentally reshape the way we work,” a source later told us. “Over the next two years, we will provide our Workplace customers the option to transition to Zoom’s Workvivo product, Meta’s only preferred migration partner.” Others like Bloomberg and Reuters have also since reported the news. (original article continues below)
The change marks the end of a ten-year run for the product, which had big plans to bring a differentiated revenue stream to Facebook but ultimately found it too hard to compete against the likes of Slack and later Teams from Microsoft.
The division has been up in the air strategically for a while, so this should not come as too much of a surprise. We had even heard that in the wake of Covid, Meta was approached by outside investment firms to spin out the division as a standalone company that would then get outside investment.
Meta declined, a source said, primarily because Facebook (and now Meta) saw Workplace as a “strategic asset”. That was not because Workplace generates sales anywhere close to the billions Meta makes from advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but because it was important for presenting a more diverse face to the market. And it helped Meta make a case about its diverse offerings to other stakeholders, showing regulators that it was more than just a too-powerful social network, and showing organizations that Facebook could do more for them than just sell ads.
“It helps make Facebook [and Meta] look like an adult,” the source said.
Clearly, the company’s priorities are changing to focus on AI and so that could mean other reorganizations beyond this over time.
Workplace originally built out of how Facebook itself was using its flagship social network. It was already running a more closed version of Facebook for its own internal teams, and the company saw an opportunity to build that out as a product to target business users.
Its working title was Facebook @ Work and it was built out by a team based in London and headed up by Lars Rasmussen, a co-creator of Google Maps who was brought on by Facebook and was working as the company’s head of engineering. (He long wanted to build an enterprise service at Facebook, and this was his baby.)
Eventually the product launched out of beta as Workplace and proceeded to build out a number of third-party integrations as Facebook saw an opportunity to create more productivity hooks for users around the basic purpose of communication.
Over time Workplace managed to pick up some very significant customers, but ultimately there was an unexpected curve in the road, however. Slack was a viral hit and was finding huge traction, which in turn spurred the creation of Teams from Microsoft. Workplace initially set out to hold its own against these, but eventually conceded ground and partnered with Teams for certain functionalities.
Over time a number of key employees building Workplace left, and a source tells us that the product never really recovered after Covid.
“Growth slowed down” after the pandemic, the source said, and with the company in somewhat of an identity crisis these days — after all, it’s not even called Facebook anymore, and it’s not even clear that Meta makes much sense either — “it also shows that it is being more decisive by killing all non-core projects.”
Here’s the company’s memo to customers:
Dear Workplace admin,
Today, we’re sharing that we’ve made the difficult decision to close Workplace from Meta in 2026.
We understand that this decision will be disruptive to the businesses, organizations and partners that rely on Workplace every day. Our priority is to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Timelines
Our current plans allow you to continue using Workplace as usual until August 31, 2025. Account management and customer support teams will remain available to address any questions or concerns you may have during this time. Additionally, Meta will be discounting Workplace by 50% starting September 1, 2024.
From September 1, 2025 until May 31, 2026, Workplace will be free of charge and only be accessible to read and download existing data, after which, access will be terminated and your Workplace instance will be deleted.
Download your information
To download your data, you can turn on the Download Your Information tool for your users so they can download their data directly from their Workplace settings. If you would like to export information from your Workplace, you can use the Workplace API.
While we appreciate you may already have an existing technology partner, Workvivo by Zoom is Meta’s only preferred migration partner, and we will be working with Zoom to provide additional tools and services to facilitate a better transition for customers from Workplace to Zoom’s Workvivo product.
Workplace by Facebook opens to sell enterprise social networking to the masses
Updated to include Meta’s confirmation.
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