Crypto News: Who will set the vibes if TikTok is banned?

If TikTok falls, where will trends sprout from? That's the question Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter Amanda Mull explores in her latest Buying Power column, an excerpt of which is below. Plus, the next trendsetters for luxury brands should be over 50, experts say. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

If you were to use TikTok's own vernacular to describe its current state, you might say the vibes are unsettled. A law banning the app in the US is set to go into effect on Jan. 19, though it's anyone's guess whether it actually will. Legal experts have generally described TikTok's path to salvation as narrow—lower courts have sided with the Biden administration, and President-elect Donald Trump cannot himself squash the ban he first proposed in 2020 once he takes office. But the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the app's appeal, and Trump has asked the court to delay the ban's implementation until after he takes office in hopes of brokering a deal with its parent company, ByteDance Ltd. ByteDance, too, could head off the ban by selling its US business, but the Chinese company has said it has no intention of doing so.

Illustration: Saratta Chuengsatiansup for Bloomberg Businessweek

What hangs in the balance is a platform that, for better or worse, has emerged as a vast engine for cultural production. The app says it has more than 170 million active users in the US, and according to a Pew Research Center survey almost two-thirds of adults under age 30 use it regularly. In early 2024, Bloomberg reported that ByteDance was aiming for more than $17 billion in US sales for the year via TikTok Shop, which allows users to buy products they encounter directly on the app. From this milieu, trends emerge constantly and ceaselessly. "So much happens there first," says Casey Lewis, a consultant and the author of After School, a newsletter documenting consumer behavior among young people.

But what happens on TikTok doesn't stay there. Instead the app has become something of an assignment editor for the internet at large, pushing the ideas of TikTok creators—girl dinner, everything shower, quiet luxury—out into traditional media and onto other platforms, as well as into the marketing plans for all kinds of products. The app's memes and trends can spout seemingly at random—do we all remember "very demure, very mindful"?—and saturate the internet in a matter of days, influencing an enormous amount of economic activity, both on and off the app. The most successful TikTok creators are able to quit their day job in favor of reviewing Amazon products or producing recipe tutorials, and brands that catch on among users, such as e.l.f Beauty and Duolingo, have seen their revenue soar. Sometimes that's thanks to sales directly through TikTok Shop, but more often through the force of the app's influence on all kinds of spending.

Keep reading: What Happens When TikTok's Trend Machine Shuts Down?

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Luxury Brands Could Use a New Target

By all accounts 2024 was one of the worst years for luxury in more than a decade. Among the culprits: tough straits for Chinese consumers, who in recent years have accounted for as much as one-fifth of global luxury spending, and shoppers' pushback against exorbitant price increases enacted by many of high-end brands. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, far and away the biggest of all the publicly traded luxury companies, saw its market value shrink by more than 13% last year.

Donald Trump's return to the White House is casting another shadow over the industry, which has much to lose from a ramp-up in the trade wars. To counteract the potential drag on their business from higher tariffs, say experts, purveyors of luxury products should devote more attention to a customer demographic they've neglected in recent years: the so-called silver generation.

"The fashion industry has for years been obsessed with youth," says Anita Balchandani, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co. who helps oversee the consulting firm's annual State of Fashion report. "But it's time now for brands to really start to talk about the over-50 shopper."

Angelina Rascouet writes about how fashion houses might attract a new demographic: Luxury Brands Need to Get Over Their Youth Fixation to Offset Drag From Trump's Tariffs

E-Commerce Surge

$241 billion

That's how much Americans shelled out for online purchases over the holiday period, a record sparked by widespread discounts. More than half the total spent in the last two months of the year was on electronics, apparel and home goods.

Tilting Right

"Canadians deserve a real choice in the next election, and it has become obvious to me, with the internal battles, that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election."

Justin Trudeau

Prime minister of Canada

Trudeau's resignation as the leader of his party marks both the end of a political era and the beginning of a potentially dramatic reshaping of the nation's economy.