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Popular teen app Musical.ly sells for reported $800M

Music video social app Musical.ly has been sold to a Chinese company that makes a news aggregation app, for almost a billion dollars.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
Expertise Ty has worked for radio, print, and online publications, and has been writing about home entertainment since 2004. He majored in Cinema Studies when studying at RMIT. He is an avid record collector and streaming music enthusiast. Credentials
  • Ty was nominated for Best New Journalist at the Australian IT Journalism awards, but he has only ever won one thing. As a youth, he was awarded a free session for the photography studio at a local supermarket.
Ty Pendlebury
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Screenshot:Ty Pendlebury/CNET

Popular social music app Musical.ly has been bought by Beijing Bytedance Technology for a reported $800 million, according to Bloomberg.

Bytedance, a company valued at $20 billion and which produces the Toutiao news aggregation app, announced the news on Friday morning but did not announce the financial terms, according to Bloomberg.  

Musical.ly lets users lip-sync along to short music clips or sing and dance a capella and upload it to the site. Users can share, like and comment on the clips, which run between 15 seconds and a minute in length.

Musical.ly, founded in Shanghai by Louis Yang and Alex Zhu in 2014, reached 90 million downloads within two years.

Musical.ly isn't the first social app to attract high bids after Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013 for a reported $1 billion and Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion a year later.