 "The Chinese music app that wants to be the next Facebook")
Bridget Kelly learned about Musical.ly at a sleepover and was hooked. Before long, the 12-year-old Moraga, California, resident and her friends were using the app to make 15-second music videos showing off their acapella or lip-syncing skills. After school, they choreographed moves for their next music video and performed “duets” with favourite celebrities.
Kelly is one of more than 100 million “musers” around the world who create, share and discover short music videos on Musical.ly. In minutes, users can filter, edit and broadcast short video clips to their favourite songs and browse through the millions of videos created every day in curated and personalised feeds. Founded in Shanghai just two years ago, the app has exploded among U.S. teens, attracted mainstream entertainers like Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande and even spawned a roster of Musical.ly stars who pull in millions of followers.
Along the way, Musical.ly has captured the imagination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The company has raised more $100 million at about a half -billion-dollar valuation, and has lined up backers including DCM Ventures, GGV Capital and Greylock Partners. Analysts have mentioned Musical.ly as a potential threat to Facebook’s user base, while Mark Zuckerberg dubbed the app a new and “interesting” social platform in the same breath as Snapchat.
Musical.ly co-founder Alex Zhu, 37, is acutely aware that he must transcend the fickle tastes of American teens to survive long term. In June, he and his team launched Live.ly, a live streaming app that has already attracted 11.5 million users, including such luminaries as billionaire and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban.
Ultimately Zhu wants to become more like Facebook or China’s WeChat, which is like Facebook, Spotify, Slack, Uber, PayPal, Yelp, Periscope and more all rolled into one. People use WeChat to talk to companies and friends, livestream, pay rent, invest and book taxi cabs or hair cuts. Having spent time in both Silicon Valley and China, Zhu believes he’s in the perfect position to watch innovations coming from both parts of the world and cherry-pick the best ones. In social media, he says, “you either can become a huge general platform like Instagram or Snapchat, or die. There’s nowhere in between. I believe Musical.ly can become a general social network.”
Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Snapchat’s first institutional investor, has met dozens of startups aspiring to be the WeChat of America. “It’s like every teenage boy’s grand plan is to become an NBA player and not everyone is successful,” he says. “It’s a very difficult thing to do. The WeChat of America may already exist. It might be Snapchat, or Facebook messenger. That’s a hard thing to aspire to.”
Zhu, who trained as a civil engineer, got into the tech game in 2000 when he joined China Pages, which created websites and was the first company started by Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Zhu spent the bulk of his career at German software giant SAP, where he worked with business customers.
Kelly is one of more than 100 million “musers” around the world who create, share and discover short music videos on Musical.ly. In minutes, users can filter, edit and broadcast short video clips to their favourite songs and browse through the millions of videos created every day in curated and personalised feeds. Founded in Shanghai just two years ago, the app has exploded among U.S. teens, attracted mainstream entertainers like Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande and even spawned a roster of Musical.ly stars who pull in millions of followers.
Along the way, Musical.ly has captured the imagination of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The company has raised more $100 million at about a half -billion-dollar valuation, and has lined up backers including DCM Ventures, GGV Capital and Greylock Partners. Analysts have mentioned Musical.ly as a potential threat to Facebook’s user base, while Mark Zuckerberg dubbed the app a new and “interesting” social platform in the same breath as Snapchat.
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Like many mobile phenomena before it, however, Musical.ly is already experiencing the limits of its appeal. While some 40 million people are using the app every month, many aren’t visiting every day. Investors use the ratio between daily active users and monthly active users to ascertain an app’s stickiness. A ratio of 50 per cent means the average user is on the app 15 out of 30 days of the month. But based on an analysis of Google Play and Apple iOS data, the average Musical.ly user visits the app just three of 30 days. Middle-schooler Kelly is a case in point. Since discovering the app half a year ago, she and her friends have been using Musical.ly less and less. Some of her friends have deleted the app altogether. (Based on numbers provided by the company, the average user checks the app about 10 days a month.)
Musical.ly co-founder Alex Zhu, 37, is acutely aware that he must transcend the fickle tastes of American teens to survive long term. In June, he and his team launched Live.ly, a live streaming app that has already attracted 11.5 million users, including such luminaries as billionaire and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban.
Ultimately Zhu wants to become more like Facebook or China’s WeChat, which is like Facebook, Spotify, Slack, Uber, PayPal, Yelp, Periscope and more all rolled into one. People use WeChat to talk to companies and friends, livestream, pay rent, invest and book taxi cabs or hair cuts. Having spent time in both Silicon Valley and China, Zhu believes he’s in the perfect position to watch innovations coming from both parts of the world and cherry-pick the best ones. In social media, he says, “you either can become a huge general platform like Instagram or Snapchat, or die. There’s nowhere in between. I believe Musical.ly can become a general social network.”
Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Snapchat’s first institutional investor, has met dozens of startups aspiring to be the WeChat of America. “It’s like every teenage boy’s grand plan is to become an NBA player and not everyone is successful,” he says. “It’s a very difficult thing to do. The WeChat of America may already exist. It might be Snapchat, or Facebook messenger. That’s a hard thing to aspire to.”
Zhu, who trained as a civil engineer, got into the tech game in 2000 when he joined China Pages, which created websites and was the first company started by Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Zhu spent the bulk of his career at German software giant SAP, where he worked with business customers.