How to use Musical.ly, the app with 150 million users that teens are obsessed with
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I remember the days of coming home from school and tuning into MTV's "TRL," a program that counted down the top music videos in front of screaming mobs of adolescent girls.
Today, teens are finding the same guilty pleasure in an app.
Musical.ly is a video network app, where users — or "musers," as they're called — create 15-second videos of themselves lip-syncing and dancing along to popular music. You can "heart" videos and create digital duets with your "BFFs," or people you follow and who follow you back.
More than 150 million people, mostly teens, have registered. If the demographic isn't abundantly clear from scrolling through the featured videos, the app also reminds you of its target user during sign-up, when it enters 2000 as the default birth year.
After talking with a handful of middle schoolers for Musical.ly tips, I entered the mysterious world of teen-tech to see what the buzz is all about. Here are the basics.
When you open the Musical.ly app, it defaults to a feed of featured videos.
musical.ly and Melia Robinson/Tech InsiderThese are often the coolest, most liked videos of the day. The Featured feed is also a good place to find inspiration.
Users, or "musers," include the hashtag #featureme in their posts in order to be discovered by the app's curators.
You can switch to the Follow tab, which shows you videos from the musers you follow.
musical.ly and Melia Robinson/Tech InsiderA majority of teens I talked to said they prefer the Follow tab to Feature. That way, they can easily see what content comes from their friends, as opposed to randoms on the internet.
Being 10 years older than most musers, I don't have many friends on the app. I followed mainstream celebrities like Selena Gomez, Jason Derulo, and Ariana Grande.
Here's what a typical Musical.ly video looks like.
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Identical twins Lisa and Lena, from Germany, have racked up more than 13.7 million followers on Musical.ly and run one of the fastest growing Instagram accounts.
The teens joined Musical.ly a year ago, and their videos have since soared in production quality, thanks to lighting, choreography, and matching outfits from their own clothing line.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider