Product details

Musical.ly was a fast-growing app that resonated with millions of teenagers who created and shared karaoke videos. Nearly half of American teens had used Musical.ly, since its debut in 2014. This Chinese start-up chose to build its business abroad with its co-founder Alex Zhu (Zhu) overseeing the operations from Shanghai. It created a platform where young people could lip sync to various songs, vines or parody and share the 15-second videos. After an initial hiccup, the app usage exploded and had not fallen from the top 40 position in iOS App Store’s Free Chart. By May 2016, the app was singing a different tune to expand its user base by launching a streaming service called Live.ly. With more than 133 million Musical.ly users called 'Musers' and valued at USD500 million, the app had levelled the pop-culture playing ground. Musical.ly's advertising potential and expanding user base were used by both the musers and established artists to promote their work. The 'secondary consumption' of the contents through the app had enticed the users to visit streaming sites that led to 'primary consumption' of the musical contents, thereby disrupting the music industry. Despite the privacy risks and the cringe factor involved, Zhu was planning to cherry pick the best practices followed in China's social networking sites to make Musical.ly a full-fledged social network. Would Musical.ly become the next Facebook of the future, representing a new frontier in pop music? Would it continue to gain traction among teens known for their fickleness?