2016 BELONGS TO MUSICAL.LY

musical.ly boasts a user base of 60 million teenagers, has launched the careers of several cross-platform social media celebrities, entered into rights negotiations with music publishers and record labels and is beginning to receive attention from mainstream celebrities.

Which is all very impressive when you consider that not many people even know what musical.ly is.

In short, musical.ly is a lip-syncing app that combines elements of Dubsmash, Snapchat, Instagram and Vine. Its developers boast that they offer a free service and social media platform, serving as “an outlet for creative expression and communication.”

In terms of its service, ‘musers’, as users of the app are called, have the ability to record and edit 15 second music videos to accompany popular songs. On the social side, they can then share their musical creations internally and, after saving their video, externally on other social platforms.

musical.ly encourages and rewards certain content by featuring and verifying musers who produce creative, original and entertaining “musicals”. Further, there are contests, challenges and trending topics for musers to participate in. Users can also be ‘inspired’ by other musicals, which facilitates the idea of the musical.ly community being social creators rather than just ‘users’.

With its rapid growth and appeal to a younger demographic, musical.ly appears to be following a similar path to success as its contemporary in the video sharing world, Snapchat; ranking alongside it and others as being one of the apps teens were most excited about in January 2016. In fact, the core of musical.ly’s user base is even younger than that of the millennial-heavy Snapchat.

While there are some concerns about the app potentially infringing on the copyright of musical rights holders, musical.ly has, so far, consistently been charting in or near the Apple App Store’s Top 20 free apps. If the success it has found continues, it’s not unreasonable to predict that 2016 could belong to musical.ly.