Essex-based 17-year-old Amelia Gething was on holiday with her family in Barbados this summer when a stranger approached with a question: “Are you on Musical.ly? My daughters recognised you but they’re too shy to say hello.”
That experience, Gething laughs, “was very weird”. She may need to embrace the weird: her instinctively funny videos have earned her 600,000 fans and made her one of the biggest UK stars on Musical.ly, an app that allows users to lip-synch to songs, apply music video-style effects and share the results. When we speak, of Musical.ly’s 95 million users – or Musers – she’s ranked 67th, and since joining the app her Instagram followers have rocketed from 700 to more than 90,000.
Gething had previously used a similar but less feature-rich app called Dubsmash but was put on to Musical.ly by a friend last summer. Musical.ly featured one of her videos on its homescreen – an accolade, she says, that is “the thing everyone in the app wants”.
It’s one of the last two years’ biggest success stories, but Musical.ly’s triumph was rooted in the failure of a struggling startup called Cicada, an educational app featuring short explainer videos, that simply didn’t take off. The story goes that with $20,000 left in the bank, Cicada’s founders made a last-ditch pivot in an attempt to make good on venture capitalists’ $250,000 investment, and Musical.ly was born. Initially the aspect ratio of its videos meant the app’s logo was chopped off when clips were uploaded to other networks such as Instagram. When the logo was repositioned, so that everyone knew the origin of shared videos, usage exploded.
On paper, the idea of an app allowing teens to lip-sync to hit songs may not sound very exciting – in the UK, most of those teens’ parents grew up watching precisely that on Top of the Pops – but it takes 10 seconds inside the app to grasp its appeal. The best contributors, such as US-based uber-Muser Baby Ariel, capture with unusual clarity the euphoria and drama of a great chorus in clips that are funny, expressive and innovative, not to mention surreal. Search for Musical.lys set to Sia’s US No 1 Cheap Thrills, and you’ll see Musers whitewater rafting, baking muffins, cycling, sled racing, and stacking Cheerios near an unimpressed dog.
With some inevitability, as the app’s success has increased so has interest from the music industry. Acts like Selena Gomez and Jason Derulo have used it to engage with fans, while Warner Music Group was recently the first major label to sign a licensing deal with the app. “It suggests to me that Warner understands that the phenomenon of user-generated music videos isn’t going away,” notes Tim Ingham, the founder ofMusic Business Worldwide. Of Musical.ly’s buoyancy in an ocean of failed music-related startups, he adds: “You can explain what Musical.ly does in one sentence. It’s a simple idea, executed well in a market that will keep growing and growing. No wonder it’s causing some noise.”
The app also acts as a launchpad for new artists. One is Carson Lueders, 15, a talented Washington-based singer managed by Johnny Wright and Melinda Bell, whose previous charges include minor success stories like *NSync and Britney Spears. Carson phones the Observer from home, where he’s spent the day getting to grips with his new Segway, playing Pokémon and recording a new Musical.ly. “Say I release a song,” he supposes, when asked to explain the app’s power. “All my fans out there can re-lip-synch to my song and reuse it in their own Musical.lys. It’s a huge platform, and it’s really taking over this generation of kids.”
Lueders has 2.9 million fans on Musical.ly. He insists that to launch as an artist “if you’re young, you need social media”, so it’s interesting that he measures success in a rather old-fashioned way. He wants to perform at Madison Square Garden, and thinks you’ve really made it “when you’ve sold a million records”.
Carson seems sure the app has a long-term future – “I think it will be around for a while and nobody’s going anywhere” – and it’s recently launched a sister app called Live.ly. With news that Instagram owner Facebook has acquired the team behind Eyegroove, an app that allows users to create short music videos, this is certainly no time for complacency at Musical.ly HQ. Let’s remember that until last year, Amelia Gething had been quite happy using Dubsmash. “I don’t know who’s still on Dubsmash,” she notes today. “I deleted the app ages ago.”