Musical.ly: Popular app originally designed by Chinese team

Global Business

Musical.ly Popular app originally designed by Chinese team

Musical.ly, an APP has 100 million users, has helped create plenty of stars like Baby Ariel, who has more than 10 million fans. Musical.ly is actually a Chinese company founded by two entrepreneurs in Shanghai.

CCTV America’s Mark Niu reported from their San Francisco office.

Two of the biggest pop stars in the world, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande, also use the app.

Louis Yang, the co-CEO and co-founder, and Alex Zhu, another co-founder, actually started out building an education app and were running out of money when they decided to pivot to music videos.

“We started from China and then soon after we launched, we figured that this product actually perfect matched the U.S. culture,” Yang said. “Everybody knows music is the universal language for different culture, so this is one of the reasons we choose music as a cutting point to build a global community.”

One of its biggest investors is GGV Capital.

“I think the first mainstream app that was partially designed or designed by a Chinese related team is probably here mainstream in the U.S. is Musical.ly,” Hans Tung, managing partner of GGV Capital said. “Is this a fad or is it something that can sustain? I think what is different from Musical.ly is that they figured out a way to evolve from a utility app that can create content, to something that is more social so that you have a social network formed.”

Last week, Musical.ly leveraged its star power to launch its new live streaming app Live.ly, which leapfrogged apps like Facebook and Snapchat to hit number one as the top U.S. download.

Ironically, as Musical.ly expands in Europe and South East Asia, it’s not planning to hit China yet.


One more question for Hans Tung: Compared to other social media, how popular has the app Musical.ly become?