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Apple Music Technology

Musical.ly in harmony with Apple Music following latest tie-up

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By John Glenday | Reporter

April 28, 2017 | 2 min read

Popular music video app Musical.ly has joined the Apple fold in a bid to extend its global reach with Apple Music, providing the snippets of songs used to power the service from Friday.

The tie-up makes sense from Apple’s point of view as well as it gains a new marketing partner in the process but is bad news for UK provider 7digital, which has been shouldered aside as a tunes provider.

Following the new partnership Musical.ly will be able to expand the territories it operates in from 30 to 120 in return for promoting Apple’s subscription services to its userbase, with Apple Music subscribers able to listen to full length tracks.

Musical.ly rose to prominence last year as a form of social network popular with US teens and tweens, valuing the business, which has a userbase of 100m, at $500m. This success has prompted it to launch a live streaming corollary app called Live.ly.

More recently however Musical.ly has struggled to maintain momentum, slipping from the top spot in Apple’s App Store rankings last year down to a lowly 89th spot today.

Apple Music recently suffered a knock when Jay Z pulled his music from the service, together with Spotify, to raise the appeal of his own Tidal platform.

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