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Bytedance completes Musical.ly acquisition, launches creator fund

By | Published on Thursday 21 December 2017

Musical.ly

Musically-orientated social network Musical.ly is now officially part of Beijing-based Bytedance, the latter having announced it was buying the former last month. And to celebrate Musical.ly is launching a $50 million fund to “support global users in honing their creative talents and content creation efforts”. Good times.

Confirming his company’s acquisition of the also China-based Musical.ly, the boss of Bytedance, Yiming Zhang, said yesterday: “We are delighted to formally welcome musical.ly to the Bytedance family. We are excited to leverage the great synergy between the two companies and explore opportunities to bring an even better content experience to our global users”.

He added: “We are impressed by the passion of the user community, whose creativity, humour, and expression of their interests through short videos has made musical.ly a powerful and engaging platform. Bytedance’s leading AI technology and strength in Asian markets will help accelerate this app’s innovation in mobile video creation and provide the opportunity for content creators and brands to engage with new markets”.

The all-new Musical.ly Creator Fund will invest in various education and training programmes – and “community enrichment” initiatives (whatever ever they are) – in order to support all the people lip syncing and doing other creative stuff along to musical snippets via the Musical.ly app.

Says Musical.ly co-founder Alex Zhu: “Our vision is to inspire the world to create, and we’re excited to offer our users the ability to express their creativity, advance their talents, and even make a living on musical.ly”.

He goes on: “From everyday creators to established influencers, our users make musical.ly a dynamic and entertaining video community for millions of people around the world. The musical.ly Creator Fund illustrates our commitment to supporting the growth and development of our creators and expanding the opportunities available to the creator community, both inside and beyond the app”.



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