Heads up, kids and teens: Musical.ly is now a thing of the past.
China's Bytedance, which acquired Musical.ly late last year for almost $1 billion, is shutting down the popular lip-sync app, which had 100 million monthly active users. Bytedance will migrate them to a similar service called TikTok, which will happen automatically the next time they update Musical.ly.
In a statement, Musical.ly co-founder and SVP of TikTok Alex Zhu said combining the two services "is a natural fit given the shared mission of both experiences – to create a community where everyone can be a creator."
Fortunately, you won't have to start from scratch to build your presence on TikTok. Accounts, content, and fan bases "will move automatically to the new TikTok app, where creators will keep all of their preexisting content and fans," the company said in a news release.
TikTok offers feeds that let you browse content from friends and recommended videos, which are served up based on your viewing habits. In the future, the company plans to add a couple new features, including "gesture filters," "funhouse mirror camera effects," "VR-type filters that can be activated just by blinking," and "green screen-like background effects."
"TikTok, the sound of a ticking clock, represents the short nature of the video platform," Zhu said. "We want to capture the world's creativity and knowledge under this new name and remind everyone to treasure every precious life moment."
The Musical.ly shutdown comes after Facebook in June introduced a similar feature called Lip Sync Live, which "lets you lip sync to songs from forever favorites ...to new hits" during live broadcasts.