Social media app TikTok has cemented itself as a huge force in the music industry in only a couple of years, up to the point where the charts are full of songs people automatically link to TikTok when they hear them outside of the app. TikTok emerged in its current form in August 2018, after similar app musical.ly was sold to Chinese technology company ByteDance, who owned TikTok. Musical.ly was then merged with TikTok, to reach a wider (older) age demographic, with musical.ly accounts automatically becoming TikTok accounts. As of September 2020, the app had surpassed 2 billion downloads worldwide, available in 154 countries. Musical.ly’s popularity was tiny compared to this, reaching 70 million downloads in May 2016 (I couldn’t find any data more recent than this). The difference in popularity between the two apps is most likely due to the versatility enjoyed by Tiktok. Musical.ly was primarily a lip-syncing app, and there are only so many times you can watch people lip-sync to the sa...