Facebook made a big announcement in late October about a new music video app that is currently under development. Early reports say this app will be named Lasso.
The social media giant has always been known to develop products that challenge their competition.
This new app is hoping to compete with TikTok, which recently acquired Musical.ly. Facebook hopes to capitalize on the new music label licenses that it has obtained by bringing Lasso to the teen market.
What is Lasso?
If you love music, you probably enjoy singing and dancing to your favorite songs. With Lasso, you will get the chance to do that and record your own music video in the process. In this app, users can record and share the video recording of them lip syncing and dancing to current hits.
According to Facebook, it is being developed to compete with Musical.ly. The latter was a huge hit among pre-teens and teen fans. But just recently, Musical.ly (which had 60 million monthly users) was acquired by TikTok. It was reported that the app was purchased for $1 billion!
The Lasso music video app from Facebook will have a full-screen display. It is a fun to use app that is built for creation. The app is being developed by the same people behind the video and Watch team on Facebook.
The report of the new app came after the announcement of new music features available to Facebook.
In addition to that, Facebook also brought new music stickers to its Stories feature.
What to Expect
Earlier this year, Facebook acquired quite a few music licensing deals from numerous record labels.
What this means for users is that user videos can be uploaded without copyright infringement. But they soon followed the lead of Instagram wherein users can add soundtracks to their Stories. The one thing that Facebook has an advantage of over TikTok is that it has rights to full songs. This isn’t the case with TikTok, wherein any uploaded music comes with a 15-second limit.
Here are some of the feature highlights that you can expect from Facebook’s Lasso:
- The music video app is targeted for the same market as Tiktok’s – pre-teens and teens.
- It is a full-screen display that is focused on creation.
- Facebook has been studying the music video space since 2016. In fact, it was reported that Facebook developed a team specifically to conduct research on Musical.ly.
- Facebook’s efforts to develop a standalone music video app were reinvigorated after they secured licensing deals. This will enable future users of Lasso to lip sync or dance to full songs, not just clips.
Since Lasso is still in its infancy, you can expect more details to come out soon. For now, the information provided by Facebook serves as a teaser for its upcoming official launch.
