Why Everyone Is Downloading This New Social Media App

Have you joined musical.ly yet?
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Move over Vine — there’s a new video app making waves in the App Store. When Business Insider surveyed teens about their favorite apps in January, a sixth of the focus group listed musical.ly (spelled with a lowercase m) as the app “they were most excited about and doubted adults would know about.” This makes sense, because none of the adults in the media have covered it, yet it charted on the App Store’s Top 20 list of free apps, and is currently ranked No. 26.

So what exactly is musical.ly? Think of it as a mixture of Vine, Snapchat, and Dubsmash — users, or “musers” as they’re called, can record 15-second music videos of their favorite songs, and share them in a totally new social space. When editing, musers can play with the speed of the video, add filters, and elect to play the video backwards (like Boomerang for Insta). “I think that musical.ly is a very unique app in the sense that you can put these effects on there that may come from iMovie and you can put filters on there as if you’re on Instagram,” Liza Koshy, a muser with over 2 million followers, tells Teen Vogue. But what makes musical.ly special is the way that you’re able to combine these features to create something new.

Fifteen-year-old Baby Ariel is the top muser on the platform, and has used her musical.ly audience to gain a massive following on YouTube and Instagram. On YouTube, she posts musical.ly tutorials that have accumulated over 5 million views, and comedy videos that have gotten upwards of a million hits. For Ariel, musical.ly is a way to express herself. “It really depends on what mood I’m in, if I want to make a musical video, I’ll pick a song about how I’m feeling, and after that I’ll pick a part of the song and I’ll think of different hand gestures or facial expressions,” she tells Teen Vogue. “If I want to do a comedy video, I’ll choose a skit and think about how to perform it and portray that character.”

Liza notes that app’s sense of community is one of its best features. “I get a notification every now and then that ‘someone was inspired by your musical.ly!’ and I think it’s really cool to use [the word] ‘inspired’ because I think as social creators that’s what we all are,” she says. “It’s that we’re inspired by other things that we see, whether that be in daily life or by other creators online.”

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