The owner of popular short-form video app TikTok, ByteDance, is planning on entering the music streaming market, going into battle with the likes of Spotify and Apple with a service of its own.

ByteDance is currently in talks with some of the world’s biggest record firms, including Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music, for global licensing deals that would pave the way for it to debut its music streaming service, reports the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter.

Should ByteDance reach agreements with the record labels, the service could arrive as early as December, debuting in nations such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil, before eventually arriving in the US in future.

There’s no name reported for the service yet and also no suggestions about possible pricing, though we can expect ByteDance to undercut existing streaming services. The one thing we do know is that the service will differentiate itself from other by including a library of short video clips which can be synced to songs as users listen and then shared with others, much like TikTok itself.

News of the upcoming music streaming service from ByteDance almost coincides with a report from Sensor Tower stating that TikTok has now crossed the 1.5bn downloads mark across the App Store and Google Play.

In 2019 so far, TikTok has been downloaded 614m times – a six per cent increase over the number of downloads it had at the same point in 2018. It’s currently the third-most downloaded non-gaming app after WhatsApp and Messenger.