bbno$ Speaks Out on TikTok Canada Shutting Down

In 2021, a scrappy little TikTok of bbno$ wiggling his eyebrows to the bounce of Edamame started circulating, the kind of clip you scroll past twice before realizing it’s about to colonize your brain.

A few days later, the Canadian team at TikTok slid into his inbox with a suggestion: redo it with a safari filter. He did. They pushed it global. The track — a rubbery, hyper-caffeinated link-up with Indonesian rapper Rich Brian — went nuclear, six-times Platinum across borders bbno$ had never even toured.

That goofy eyebrow raise basically rewired his career.

But the ecosystem that helped launch him, and so many others, is now hanging by a thread. Ottawa has ordered TikTok’s Canadian division to dissolve after a national security review of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

The app itself will stay live, but the local team — the people who help boost songs, spotlight creators, and make these viral moments feel like they came from somewhere — will be gone.

“Being an artist in this generation is like, you’re basically a TikTokker,” says bbno$, aka Alexander Gumuchian. Without a local team to help spotlight tracks as they start to bubble, he says, “I’m losing ammunition to fire my career up.”

Meanwhile, Ottawa insists the crackdown is about “national security risks.” A government spokesperson declined to share details, citing confidentiality laws. But the spectre of China’s National Intelligence Law — which allows Beijing access to data from Chinese-owned companies — looms large.

For now, TikTok Canada is running campaigns to prove its worth. Artists are rallying too, maybe out of desperation, maybe just solidarity. Because when you’re an emerging musician in Canada, sometimes it’s not the festival slot or radio spin that matters most.