ByteDance

• The multi-year, multi-product deal licenses the repertoire of Warner Recorded Music and Warner Chappell Music to TikTok, TikTok Music, CapCut, and TikTok's Commercial Music Library.
• It will create new revenue, marketing, and insights opportunities for WMG's artists and songwriters, while deepening the engagement with TikTok's huge audience of passionate music fans.
• Robert Kyncl, CEO, WMG said: "We are happy and excited for our next chapter together with TikTok.
• Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, said: "We are very excited to partner with Warner Music Group to create a shared vision for the future in which artists, songwriters, music fans, and the industry can all benefit from the power of discovery on TikTok platforms."

• The company has also partnered with Tokens Studio , the popular design tokens plugin, to build native Penpot compatibility and an AI engine capable of generating design systems and key design workflows.
• Since the company launched General Availability in February, sign-ups have grown by 66% to 400,000 users, with self-hosted deployments doubling.
• Sign up for early access to the new Tokens Studio plugin for Penpot as the beta becomes available in the coming months.
• “Tokens Studio is intimately aware of the unique hurdles to bringing AI to design, and we are excited to share what we are working on with them very soon.”

• To  maximize monetization within their apps, the top publishers in 2022 adopted hybrid strategies through a combination of one-time purchases and recurring subscriptions.
• In 2022, 42 of the top 50 publishers found monetization success predominately through in-app purchases and we expect this trend to continue.
• This is in comparison to 8 out of the top 50 publishers which predominantly used a subscription strategy to monetize their suite of apps.
• However, the United States had the largest number of top publishers for a single country with 17, followed by China with 12.

• The newest trend to hit TikTok from a relationship trend perspective: beige flags.
• For those unfamiliar with the platform, TikTok, is a video-sharing social media platform originally released by ByteDance as “Douyin” in China.
• As of February 2021, TikTok was downloaded over 2.6 billion times worldwide, and boasts approximately one billion monthly average users.
• A trend which allows for both discussion and change in the relationship space but may also reinforce pre-existing boundaries and norms.

What is a “beige flag”?

• In essence, the person wasn’t a “red flag” but a “beige flag” – for boredom.
• The TikTok beige flag definition refers to the odd quirks your partner may have – which bother you, but you are willing to accept.
• Those developing the content around beige flags are usually in a long-term relationship and the post is framed as satirical or humorous.

Romance on TikTok

• In this case, and via TikTok, users are playing into a well-known, white, western storyline: the romantic masterplot, and in particular the rom-com format.
• Indeed, many of these relationship reels on TikTok rely on humour to entertain audiences, through beige flags or other intimacy trends, which are usually exaggerated for comedic effect.
• By presenting these scenarios in a humorous way, TikTok can both entertain audiences and also help to normalise the idea that dating and relationships are processes fraught with potential missteps and pitfalls.

Sites of struggle and negotiation

• Academic Martin Nakata argues online spaces – such as TikTok – can be understood as digitally mediated “sites of struggle over the meaning of [our] experience”.
• Meaning that they are spaces where users can discuss, share opinions, contest and form new ways of thinking.