Why is TikTok considering the move that has destroyed so many tech giants?

Get ready, Y2K nostalgists: TikTok may be entering the music player market.

The most important question, though, is why bother at all?

Last week, Music Business Worldwide came across a U.S. patent for a “Method and Apparatus for Playing Music” from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, filed last December. The 20-page application includes diagrams of a device described as a “target music player application,” with a similar control layout and display to TikTok and its emerging TikTok Music platform.

For Millennials and older Gen Zers, the gadget may resemble the iPod Touch — one of the last versions of Apple’s pioneering music player — but it will likely support TikTok Music and include some interactive features.

Features include a sleep timer, a “Kids’ Music” option and an “Exciting” mode that “(represents) musical content in a way that goes beyond sound” by vibrating and flashing lights to the beat of a given song.

This all sounds great, but if TikTok actually intends to make hardware changes, then precedent is definitely not on its side.

There’s already a pile of devices thrown out by software companies that have very publicly ruined the transition to hardware. Spotify is the latest to join the club, as it prepares to end support for the Car Thing, Spotify’s creatively named audio player exclusive to the car. The Thing was both released to the public and discontinued in 2022, but all existing devices in the world will become unusable on December 9 of this year.

It’s safe to say that the Car Thing’s demise was down to a number of factors, including the company’s official explanation of “streamlining its product offering” and the fact that the Thing was rarely advertised and required a paid Spotify account to use it.

But the biggest one was simply a lack of need: most cars made in the last few years already support Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which let drivers use Spotify, as well as a host of other phone apps. Older cars could benefit from Car Thing, but even then, there are plenty of aftermarket interfaces that offer more functionality than just Spotify.

The Car Thing suffered from a major flaw that plagues every music-playing device, even the mighty iPod: today, most people listen to music simply through their phones.

The lack of a reason to exist was the kiss of death for countless tech companies trying to build the next big thing. Microsoft’s Zune came too late in the post-iPod world to make an impact, while Google Glass was priced too high to do everything a phone could, just pretentiously.

Or take the brief trend of mobile devices tied to the Internet platform, such as Twitter Peek, Amazon Fire Phone, or three separate models from Facebook and HTC. Why does it matter whether your phone has a built-in Facebook button when a free Facebook app exists for all phones?

But for TikTok, the potential path to success may come down to the frame. After the first generation of Snap Spectacles launched as chunky, cute smart glasses for hipsters and ultimately proved unsuccessful, the company has transformed its Spectacles 3 into a sleeker (and more expensive) fashion statement.

Meta made a similar move with its Ray-Bans-backed Smart Glasses. Embracing the status-symbol aspect of the technology rather than the mass-market ideals and world-changing Silicon Valley dogma worked for Meta and Snap—at least for now—so maybe it’s a winning move for ByteDance, too.

And if you squint hard enough, you might be able to see the logic behind TikTok’s music player, since 2000s nostalgia is hot among TikTok’s largely Gen Z audience, so a modern interpretation of the Y2K quintessence could be a winner. There’s also the appeal of having entertainment that doesn’t involve staring at a screen, especially for young children.

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan Chan Zuckerberg Initiative recently invested £18 million (about $23 million) in a startup called Yoto, which makes screenless audio players for kids. ByteDance may be picking up on similar waves, given that the patent includes a “Music for Kids” feature.

It’s worth noting that Chinese company ByteDance has filed more than 9,000 patents worldwide by 2023. Bloomberg Law reports that about 900 of those patents are in the United States alone, so it’s unclear whether the audio player patent has high priority or is intended to prevent someone else from filing first.

In any case, the device’s launch could be a long and bumpy journey, as TikTok Music is only available in a handful of countries. Making the platform available to consumers in the U.S. could also be a touchy subject, given that TikTok and Universal Music Group recently settled their various differences.

Still, given that ByteDance’s patent comes just a few years after TikTok’s patent for a “portable wireless computing device” that can download “digital music content,” a future with TikTok hardware is a real possibility.