Musical.ly is a social media platform that allows its users to create, share, and discover multimedia content. Because of the app’s music-based functionality, content is generally made by lip-syncing to other music. Members can select from a wide variety of songs.
Musical.ly promotes content by spotlighting popular videos, song charts, and leaderboards. In addition, Musical.ly provides various video editing features such as cropping, adding filters, and enhancing colors, among others.
Musical.ly verifies its users manually to ensure authenticity. Every member account that is verified includes a crown emoji. It is only available to download on Android or iOS devices and can only access the Musical.ly platform by downloading its mobile app.
Features
Users have the option of lip-syncing to an extensive library of music clips. These include popular songs, lines from TV shows, and clips from Musers’ videos, among many others. Musicals.ly offers a lot of visual effects and filters, including fast motion, slow motion, time-lapse, reverse, and other time-machine effects.
A direct messaging function built into the app, direct.ly, and live.ly, which allows users to stream live videos, a leaderboard displaying the most popular videos, and a “Trending” section displaying popular hashtags are among the other features.
When you’re on Musical.ly and come across a profile with a crown emoji next to the username, you know that the account has been verified by the administrators. Musers who have built up a following on Musical.ly solely can gain a verified account by the administrators assigning a crown emoji to the username.
Story of Musical.ly
The app was founded in 2014 by two college friends: Kevin Gu, formerly of San Francisco-based startup video startup Vine, and Jialan Wang, who was previously a product manager at Twitter. The app does not provide a professional training room, instead depending on users’ creativity and originality for its success.
The app has since gained over 100 million active users, many of whom are teenagers. It also continues to garner millions of new users every month. Wang and Gu have since left the company, while Gu remains as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer.
In 2018, the company was purchased by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company known for TikTok and other similar mobile video applications. The app is now used by hundreds of thousands of users every day and is available in 36 different languages.
What led to Musical.ly’s demise?
ByteDance wanted to port its technology and userbase into another app it owned when it closed Musical.ly down. The app they created, as a result, is now known as TikTok, one of the world’s most popular social networks. It can be seen that ByteDance had previously released a Chinese version, Douyin, in September 2016, which amassed millions of users in its home country. However, the company struggled to establish Douyin overseas.
The opposite occurred with Musical.ly. While it failed in China, it was a big hit with American youth. Only nine months prior, ByteDance acquired Flipagram, another video-based app, for an undisclosed amount. As a result, Musical.ly and Flipagram, both of which had hundreds of millions of registered users at the time of acquisition, gave ByteDance a substantial head start.
Who Owns Musical.ly?
ByteDance, a Chinese tech company, has a controlling interest in Musical.ly. In November 2017, ByteDance purchased Musical.ly for $800 million to combine it with its existing TikTok app. Musical.ly was then purchased by ByteDance for between $800 million and $1 billion. Investors currently value TikTok at about $50 billion (ByteDance itself is worth about $425 billion, for example).
Conclusion
Musical.ly is a social media platform that enables its users to create, share, and discover video-based content. The app is available on both Android and iOS devices and can only be accessed via the users’ mobile app.
It allows its users to make music videos by lip-syncing to music tracks. It also allows you to edit your videos in a variety of ways, including boosting the intensity of your drops, adding visual effects, and more.
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