TikTok’s parent company quietly launched a music licensing platform called EasyOde

Music licensing platforms for short-form video, advertising, games, and other visual media are big business – and attract a lot of attention from deep-pocketed private investors.

Sweden’s Epidemic Sound was valued at $1.4 billion in a $450 million funding round in 2021, in which Blackstone Growth (BXG) and EQT Growth acquired stakes in the company.  Epidemic is reportedly now eyeing an IPO.

Meanwhile, over in China, TikTok parent ByteDance (valued at around $300 billion as of November 2024), appears to have a service in the works that could shake up the global music licensing market.

ByteDance owns a service called EasyOde, described as a “one-stop rights-cleared music platform.”

The existence of the EasyOde platform will likely be news to much of the global music industry.

There’s little information online about when it launched, and ByteDance has not responded to MBW’s request for information about its ambitions for the platform or how the music is sourced.

According to US Copyright Office filings unearthed by MBW, ByteDance, via its mysterious Cayman Islands-based affiliate Lemon Inc., has filed for two EasyOde-related trademarks, for the word mark and logo.

As you can see below, one of the trademarks is officially registered and one is still pending.

The trademarks have been registered under various categories including: “Music licensing services, namely, commercial administration of the licensing of music of others” and;

“Downloadable mobile applications for mobile phones and tablet computers allowing users to license, purchase, play, share, download, compose, record, upload and edit music, songs, and albums.”

According to the EasyOde website, the service offers “high-quality tracks and sound effects for use in new and traditional media projects, as well as other music-related services”.

The platform claims to feature “60,000 rights-cleared” tracks in its library.

The website also explains that EasyOde “provides [a] music customization service with multiple style and duration options”.

The platform lets you upload the video you want to license music for and it will then recommend music from its library that it deems to work well with the visual content.

EasyOde also lets you upload reference tracks to “analyze [the] beats and structure of [the] music”.

According to EasyOde: “If you find the demos meet your requirements, you can leave your contact information on the ‘Customization Service’ page. If not, please help provide 5 sample tracks per style for us to analyze and customize the style for you.”

EasyOde’s Terms of Service stipulate that users must “acknowledge and agree that the User Content that you post and upload while using [Easy Ode’s Services are created by or legally licensed to you”.

The platform also includes the following disclaimer: “We respect intellectual property rights and ask you to do the same”.

It adds: “As a condition of your access to and use of the Services, you agree not to infringe intellectual property rights of any person while using the Services.”

One of the most interesting elements of the EasyOde website, however, isn’t what it can do, but rather who at ByteDance it was potentially built by.

In the bottom left-hand corner of the site showing the website’s site map, you’ll notice a reference to the copyright belonging to ByteDance’s SAMI team — a name you may recall reading in MBW’s extensive reporting on TikTok and ByteDance’s music-related activities.

Last March, we published a pair of widely shared reports about ByteDance‘s ambitions in AI-generated music.

In one of those articles, we told you about the extensive research in AI music conducted by ByteDance’s Speech, Audio & Music Intelligence (SAMI) team. As we told you last year, this team has become quite the global priority at ByteDance/TikTok.

One of those research projects described a generative model called MeLoDy that was trained, according to ByteDance’s SAMI researchers, on 257,000 hours of music that came from 6.4 million audio files.

We also told you about a batch of US patents and trademarks secured by ByteDance and its Lemon Inc. affiliate that provide IP protection in the US for the Chinese company’s AI music-related technologies.

According to the EasyOde website, the platform is “owned by BytePlus”.

BytePlus was launched by ByteDance in 2021– reportedly as a new division to sell its AI technology.

ByteDance, via its Lemon Inc. affiliate, owns trademarks in the United States for ‘BytePlus‘ which appear to have been officially registered in May 2023.

The trademark listed on the USPTO describes a “Platform as a Service (PaaS)” and covers what the filing states are “computer software platforms for generating and delivering personalized recommendations to customers in the fields of artificial intelligence, data mining, data analytics”.

The trademark also covers “machine-learning based music generation, and machine language translation; software consultancy services relating to artificial intelligence, data mining, data analytics, and machine learning”.

BytePlus is listed in ByteDance’s corporate structure diagram, which you can see below.

We must emphasize here that we are by no means suggesting that any of the music available on EasyOde is AI-generated.

The truth is, we don’t know if any of it is.

According to EasyOde’s terms of service, “all music made available on the site is created or licensed by EasyOde”.

The website also states that its library of 60,000 “rights-cleared” tracks, which it says includes “top-trending background music in popular short video apps”, features tracks “created by music producers, and music customized by studios”.Music Business Worldwide