Tik Tok originally started as Musical.ly in 2014. Musical.ly was a social media service headquartered in Shanghai with an office in Santa Monica, California, where platform users created and shared short lip-sync videos. The first prototype was released in April 2014, and the official version was launched in August of that year. The company relaunched the app in September of 2016 naming it Tik Tok.
TikTok is a Chinese-owned social video-sharing app. Users can shoot, edit, and share 15-second videos jazzed up with filters, music, animation, special effects, and more. Like its other web-based life applications, social media users can likewise, follow, as, and remark on all that they see. TikTok can be used on iOS and Android operating systems.
Musical.ly was founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Zhan Yang in Shanghai, China in 2014. Alex and Zhan’s first venture was to be an online platform with short videos, but it didn’t bring enough revenue. Soon enough, Zhu and Yang had the money to rebuild with an entertainment sector focus. Zhu and Yang wanted to make it easy and accessible for people to shoot music videos and share them with their friends all over the world. When Musical.ly was first introduced it was introduced to both America and China, but the market that took most notice of Musical.ly was American teenagers, who enjoyed making videos the most.
In July 2015, Musical.ly had built a substantial following, and surpassed Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram in the IOS app store. The site’s users decided to name themselves “musers” and by May 2016, Musical.ly was able to successfully claim 70 million downloads. In September 2017, Tik Tok bought out Musical.ly for $1 billion, after Tik Tok saw that it was getting successful in America.
When I first discovered Tik Tok, well, it was called Musica.lly at that time, was through my 5-year-old sister. I always used to see her dancing, lip synching, and going live in front of her tablet or my mother’s phone. I was surprised and confused at the same time; I thought to myself that maybe she was on Vine but then again that’s not how Vine works. In Tik Tok’s early years it wasn’t getting any attention, it was seen as this kiddie app. That’s when higher-ups in the company decided that it might be best if they do some improvements and relaunch the app.
That’s how Tik Tok came about; the Tik Tok teams decided to start paying famous social media influencers to upload videos to spread the word about the app. Fast forward to 2020 Tik Tok is the new Instagram and Facebook, after Tik Tok knocked Snapchat off the map in 2019 with all the streaming.
Social Media users and everyone else are obsessed with Tik Tok; in conversations you hear people using Tik Tok as a form of communication.
