The year 2020 began as one of optimism. The longest bull run in stock market history had begun in 2009 and propelled the Dow Jones index to an all-time high on February 12, 2020. The four-year upward trend in both live and recorded music revenue appeared to be the harbinger of things to come…

TikTok was introduced in August 2018 as an adaptation of the already-existing Musical.ly app, which featured fifteen-second videos created by users lip-syncing and/ or dancing to existing music tracks. Chinese tech innovator and Tencent rival ByteDance had purchased Musical.ly for close to $1 billion in 2017, shut it down, and incorporated its technology into its…