Three Ways The Musical.ly App is Changing How We Interact With Music
Musical.ly is quickly becoming one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, gaining an incredible 90 million new users in the past year alone. Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, the closest thing there is to a prophet in predicting social media trends, says it’s the only app out there that “has the potential to become ‘the next Snapchat.’” But if you’re over the age of 14 there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it — its used almost exclusively by little kids.
So what is it and why should we care about it? You know how everyone fell in love with lip syncing the past couple of years thanks to, strangely enough, John Krasinski, Jimmy Fallon, and LL Cool J? This basically piggybacks off of that trend, allowing users to make their own short lip syncing videos and share them with the world. It’s basically Snapchat meets Dubsmash. Here’s a video from Baby Ariel and TheyLoveArii, the Lennon/McCartney of Musical.ly, as an example:
It’d be very easy to dismiss this as just some silly kids toy, but I think it’s much more important than that. Here’s three ways Musical.ly is changing the way people interact with the world of music.
1. It’s a new way for kids to fall in love with music and we shouldn’t dismiss that.
Kids get a lot of shit when it comes to music. We dismiss their tastes as being influenced more by marketing and hormones than the quality of the music itself. So as Musical.ly becomes more well known by the adult world there’s going to be a ton of backlash against it. It combines so much of what music elitists hate: it’s unapologetically silly, celebrates whatever music is most popular at the moment, and allows kids to directly interact with music without being musicians.
I think the last one is gonna be what really sends people over the edge. Remember those self-righteous people that hated Guitar Hero and made fun of its fans as losers who couldn’t play real instruments? For them music should always be treated with a kind of reverence and mixing it with something like video games is immature at best and offensive at worst. But at least those games had people pretending to play instruments — Musical.ly doesn’t require any musical talent whatsoever. And whereas most of the people that played those video games were men, most of musically users are tween girls, easily the most disrespected music fans in the world. Critics are gonna lose their minds with Musical.ly.
Yes, the app is silly, but what’s wrong with that? I think we often forget how we became music fans in the first place. Didn’t we all pretend to be famous musicians when we were young? Everyone has their own version: for me it was pretending I was in The Beastie Boys or air-drumming to “In Bloom.” Acting foolish and copying your heroes is an essential part of being a kid and learning about the world. When it comes to music, we should celebrate that.
2. It is a tool for kids to create and share art. Yes, art.
Musical.ly is more than just about kids pretending to be their heroes. Kids are using it to create in ways that were unthinkable even a decade ago. The aforementioned Gary Vee reminds us to not take this lightly.
“It is allowing a younger generation to generate content in ways that they would not be able to produce as easily on their own. It is democratizing content creation for young people by giving them the resources (i.e., filters, control over video speed, access to professional audio) to make fun and entertaining content.”
I don’t want to sound like a postmodern art professor, but we shouldn’t dismiss what these kids are doing on Musical.ly as illegitimate because they’re creating with other people’s music. That’s the same antiquated way of thinking that, for so many years, had critics saying that things like DJing, remixing, and collaging weren’t real art forms. Rather than shaming these kids for not picking up a guitar, we should be celebrating that they have the opportunity to create in ways that most of us couldn’t have imagined when we were younger.
3. It’s changing the relationship between artists and fans in exciting ways.
Musical.ly is also starting to change the way we interact with musicians. Many pop stars are directly engaging their fans by asking them to create videos for their new material. I can’t even imagine how amazing that must feel as young music fan to make something for one of your heroes and get their feedback on it. If this kind of thing were around when I was younger I’d sit in my room all day pretending I was Spike Jonze or Hype Williams.
I get that this might seem like just another form of teen pop marketing, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the potential here. The app allows for fans to collaborate with artists in ways unheard of on other social media platforms. And remember, Musical.ly is still relatively new and will evolve just like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat did. As the app expands to older demographics it’ll develop into new territories, spawning new ways that artists and fans can interact with each other. The changing dynamic will not only give artists more intimate ways to market their music, but the chance for unprecedented artworks to be produced in tandem with their fans.
The possibilities are endless. This potential is what’s most exciting about Musical.ly — in a few years fans will interact with music in ways that we can’t even imagine. I can’t wait to see what happens.
