TikTok has closed its Nashville office on Music Row and laid off the staff based there, saying it was aiming to streamline operations and better align teams for long-term growth. The company confirmed the closure to Nashville TV station FOX 17 News on August 5, two years after signing the lease. The Nashville Business Journal reported that all of the office's staff had been laid off, and the New York Times put the number at 250 employees, citing state labor filings.
The office occupied more than 143,600 square feet across several floors of the Moore Building on Music Row, the district long tied to Nashville's recorded-music and publishing businesses. The 2024 lease made TikTok the anchor tenant of the building and one of Nashville's largest office leases in a decade, notably larger than the 57,500 square feet TikTok had initially been expected to take. The office is set to close on October 5.
The closure follows TikTok's earlier move from a WeWork space in downtown Nashville into the Moore Building, and comes more than six months after TikTok's US business was folded into a new joint venture led by American investors, Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi's MGX, required under a 2024 US law forcing parent company ByteDance to divest its US operations or face a ban.
TikTok shut its standalone TikTok Music streaming service in November 2024 and has cut staff from its music division more than once since, including around 15 US and Latin American music-division layoffs in October 2025. Senior music executives, including global head of music partnership development Michael Kummerle, have also left over the past year.
TikTok's Nashville expansion had not gone entirely without friction: Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, a longtime critic of the app, had objected to the buildout on national-security grounds, according to the Nashville Tennessean. In its statement on the closure, TikTok said it "remained fully committed to providing secure, safe and positive experiences" for the 200 million Americans who use the platform, which the company says also reaches 7.5 million US businesses.
The facts
- TikTok closed its Nashville office on Music Row
- The closure follows a lease signed two years earlier, in 2024
- The New York Times put the layoffs at 250 employees
- The office occupied more than 143,600 square feet in the Moore Building
- The office closes October 5
- TikTok shut its standalone Music streaming app in November 2024
- Senator Marsha Blackburn had objected to TikTok's Nashville buildout on security grounds
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