The
mobile video app Musical.ly, which allowed users to record videos of themselves singing along to popular songs and share them on social media, will be shutting down.
Users
of the app will be transferred to TikTok, a similar video-sharing app owned by the Chinese telecom firm Bytedance. Bytedance bought Musical.ly last year in a deal estimated at being worth
close to $1 billion.
The shutdown marks a startling fall from grace for the app, which had a robust community of video creators and more than 100 million users. For a time after
it launched in 2014, Musical.ly was one of the hottest social apps on the Apple and Android app stores.
Musical.ly was in many ways ahead of the curve
when it came to incorporating music into user-generated content. Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook have all inked deals with record labels to make their songs available to users in the apps, to
lip-sync to and incorporate into their videos.