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ByteDance bought musical.ly in November 2017, and on 2 August 2018 it merged the lip-sync app into TikTok, its own fast-growing short video app. The Verge described musical.ly users opening their phones to a surprise: the app had been replaced overnight with a new name and logo.

The merged platform kept the TikTok name and brought a unified experience, a new logo and user interface, and more video creation tools. TikTok said the combination brought together two of the world's fastest growing short-form video apps. Reuters reported TikTok had been the world's most downloaded iOS app in the first quarter of 2018, according to Sensor Tower, while musical.ly had just reached 100 million monthly active users. In China the app stayed separate as Douyin, with more than 300 million monthly users.

Alex Zhu, musical.ly's co-founder and a senior vice president at TikTok, called the merger a natural fit and said the name evoked the short, ticking-clock nature of the videos. Accounts, content and followers were supposed to move across automatically. Not everyone noticed the press release: on the musical.ly subreddit users reported children thinking their phones had been hacked, disliked the new name, and complained of missing accounts and videos.

No outside design studio was credited; the brand came from the company itself.

TechCrunch laid out the arithmetic. Musical.ly, which ByteDance had bought for around $1 billion, had about 100 million users and was especially strong in the US; TikTok claimed 500 million monthly actives outside China. Users updating Musical.ly simply found it had become TikTok, with accounts, videos and settings intact, plus a new alert after two hours of use. The company explained the name as the sound of a ticking clock, a nod to the short format, and called the combination a natural fit. TechCrunch's read was blunter: one global platform suited advertisers better, and Facebook was circling the short video space.

This entry is about a name more than a logo. A brand with 100 million monthly users simply disappeared into a Chinese parent's bigger bet, and it worked: TikTok, not musical.ly, became the name everyone knows. As a branding lesson it is blunt. When one product is growing faster, the decisive move is to pick it and not look back.