How to Use Musical.ly In 5 Easy Steps

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 2 years, you’ve probably heard of Musical.ly and their live-streaming video app, Live.ly by now. If you have been living under a rock, let’s get you caught up.

What’s Musical.ly?

Musical.ly, at its core, is a lip syncing app. But honestly, there’s more to it than that. It’s a full-blown social network full of talented video creators and it comes with powerful tools so you can create your own music infused videos too.

The app is free to download so we’ve been messing around with it for about a week now. There are no in-app purchases available (at the time this post was published) but there are a few features within Musical.ly that can only be unlocked after you share a video to another platform (like Instagram), but most users are probably going to do that anyway.

It’s a lot like Vine since you can record multiple clips and splice them together for excellent jump cuts that really make an impact on your 15-second video. You turn your videos into musical masterpieces after shooting or uploading them to the app.

How to Use Musical.ly

Musical.ly is stupid easy to use. Literally. But if you want a step-by-step guide to follow after you’ve created your account here’s how to create a Musical.ly video:

1. Pick your music. Preferably, pick something with a good beat to it like “Say So,” by Terror Jr for example. You can search for a song in Musical.ly’s online library or browse 30+ categories from Comedy to NFL. Okay, so you’ve picked your song..
2. Now you’ll tap the little scissors icon to cut your music and choose the 15-seconds of whatever song you’re using to make your video epic.  You’ll also have 5 options displayed on your screen to determine the speed of the song: epic, slow, norm, fast, and lapse. I like norm because I (personally) feel like the other options distort a little too much. But that’s just me.
3. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE HAVE GOOD LIGHTING.
4. Figure out what you’re going to do or whoever you’re filming is going to do during your 15-seconds of lip syncing  fame. Once you’ve worked this out, hit the countdown button (it looks like a power symbol with a 5 next to it) and shoot your video.
5. After shooting the video you can add filters, title your video with a #tag and @friend, save to private, or post it for other people to see. Congrats! You just made a Musical.ly video. Hopefully it’s worth watching…
6. There’s a lot of other cool editing features you can use too like a reverse mode that makes for some pretty hilarious shots and a time trap to repeat epic moments. Musical.ly also offers a lot of awesome challenges and contests for video creators to compete in.
7. You can always choose from the list of rotating trending topics in addition to the official Musical.ly challenges that revolve around a featured topic. Right now, there’s a #WhenAllUrFriendsCanSingBut challenge happening that I think would be most appropriate for us to participate in so you might see a Z Coast Musical.ly pop up there soon.

All Aboard the Live.ly Train

Musical.ly has been around since 2014 (really!) but it didn’t explode until last summer, now boasting 100+ million users. Three months ago, Musical.ly launched Live.ly, the live-streaming version of the music video app, and has captured nearly 4.6 million active users on iOS since.  Live.ly just launched the Android version of the app on Septemeber 12th.

According to this Variety.com article, “Of apps released in the past six months on both iOS and Android, only Pokemon Go has garnered more monthly active users — with more than 31 million — than Live.ly in the U.S., according to Survey Monkey Intelligence. Besides steering Musical.ly fans to the app, Live.ly has been helped by early adopters including Jason Derulo, Cameron Dallas and Musical.ly star Jacob Sartorius.”

Live.ly still has room to grow beyond their “teen-girl segment” where it’s curently most popular. Only 33% of all Musical.ly users currently utilize Live.ly. We think it will be interesting to see if Live.ly can keep up the rapid rate of growth and really give other live-streaming apps like Periscope and YouNow a run for their money.

Your turn!

Have you been using Musical.ly and/or Live.ly? Would you like to see some Z Coast Media Musical.ly/Live.ly videos in the future?  Tell us about your experience and what you think  in the comments below!