Facebook is working on a new application that hopes to attract the attention of teenagers while capitalizing on its important music licenses for record labels. Facebook is building an independent product where users can record and share videos of themselves synchronized with their lips or dancing popular songs, according to the information of current and previous Facebook employees.
The application is designed to be an independent competitor to Musically, which was a hit with teenagers and even pre-teens before Chinese technology giant ByteDance acquired the product of 60 million monthly users for around $ 1 billion and Incorporated into the company's TikTok application.
"It's basically TikTok / Musically . It's a full screen, designed for teenagers, fun and fun, and focused on creation," a source told me. "A lot of what they're doing is just trying to be cool and lying for this report."
The product is being created by members of Facebook's video and video team under the leadership of Facebook's lead product designer, Brady Voss. , one source
One of the leaders of the Facebook video and music application team is Brady Voss, who created this Montage feature as part of a Facebook hackathon in 2016
Voss previously worked on the TV application from Facebook and in the recently closed Hello Standalone app For a 2016 hackathon project that introduced Mark Zuckerberg, Voss created a technology called Montage that would link photos of, say, a snowboarder doing a trick on a single image as in a Stationary Time Lapse Now he has again simplified creative expression with Lasso. "Brady is great with new and fun cameras and videos," said one source.
Facebo ok has been researching the space of the music application for teenagers since 2016, when a source says that the company started a research project to study Musically. There were suspicions that Musically might not be as popular as they promoted it, and Facebook relaxed.
Then, earlier this year, Facebook's musical efforts were revived when it secured licensing agreements with all the major record labels. At first, this only prevented user videos, including music style lip sync clips, from being removed for copyright infringement.
But soon launched music stickers on Instagram that allow you to add soundtracks to your Stories, and that feature was launched. On Facebook today. The company also began to experiment with a feature of Lip Sync Live to play karaoke live, and today Facebook opened it for Pages and began to display the lyrics of some songs on the screen. It aims to allow users to add their favorite songs to their profile so that friends can listen to a segment in what looks like a throwback to MySpace Music.
Meanwhile, TikTok is on the rise. According to the Annie application.
Now, only 5 percent of US teens. UU They cite Facebook as their favorite social platform, according to Piper. Jaffray survey. The percentage that uses it monthly has dropped from 60 percent to 36 percent since the spring of 2016. Facebook needs new ways to engage teens beyond Instagram and WhatsApp, and an independent music application potentially lacking its own brand It could be a better approach than cramming features for teenagers. as Lip Sync Live in your main application uncool.
Facebook already tried to recover the youth with independent applications like Poke, Slingshot, Bolt, Flash and other variations on Snapchat. But with American giants such as Snap and YouTube neglecting to build the right tools to create video music, Facebook has the opportunity to challenge China's ByteDance . Most people are not interesting with the camera, especially the clumsy teenagers. But with the right soundtrack, a stupid video selfie can become epic, or at least stupid enough to see it.