JUDGES UPHOLD LAW MANDATING TIKTOK SALE

TikTok is on the verge of being deleted after three federal judges upheld a law requiring its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app to a non-Chinese owner in the coming weeks or shut it down.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today (12/6) denied TikTok's motion to overturn the law, which was signed in April. The company has claimed a sale would most certainly be blocked by the Chinese government and that banning it would violate the First Amendment right to free speech.

Per the New York Times, the judges maintained that the law was “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary” and had no associated First Amendment implications. "The government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States,” they wrote.

With a 1/19 ban looming, TikTok is expected to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. President-elect Donald Trump has previously signaled a willingness to allow ByteDance to maintain its control of the platform.

For a music industry that has become reliant on, if not addicted to, TikTok and its 1b monthly active users to break new artists, lift back catalog and generate hit song after hit song, shuttering the app would wreak havoc on its bottom line. Indeed, TikTok’s global reach has grown to over 170 billion daily video views of licensed music.

Asked by HITS in a recent interview if he felt TikTok was too important to the American consumer for it to not exist, the company's global head of Music Business Development, Ole Obermann, said, "There are so many livelihoods, so many cultural moments, so much, frankly, education. So many things are happening across a really big user base that it's hard to imagine that you could just pull the plug on that."