Along the bottom of the video, find the user’s name, caption, and the name of the song that’s playing. Within videos, tap on the screen to pause (as with Instagram Stories), and look to the right side for the user icon of the video’s creator (which will take you to that user’s profile), the number of “hearts” it got (you can click to heart it too), and the number of comments it got (click to read them). To explore further, try the magnifying glass icon next to the home icon, where you can search key words and hashtags-yes, TikTok uses hashtags-as well as explore some of what’s trending-yes, there’s also trending in TikTok. Clicking on the home button in the bottom left corner will load up a new video. The videos that play automatically are featured videos, labeled “for you,” which the app has chosen to highlight-users can switch to “following” to see videos from the people they follow-maybe you’ll follow friends, or popular “Musers,” or just people who amuse you. On TikTok, that’s just the beginning.Īfter you download TikTok and open it on your phone, a video will start playing right away without you even selecting one (just like in IGTV). You’ve surely heard of the #InMyFeelingsChallenge, the dance craze based on the Drake song. (Due to China’s restrictive internet rules, TikTok remains a standalone app there, where it goes by the name Douyin and has over 300 million monthly active users.) ByteDance’s decision to bring the two apps together as one product was a move toward efficiency, and the company told Reuters it decided that TikTok “better reflects the breadth of content created on our platform that extends beyond music to comedy, performance art and more.” So, in early August, TikTok absorbed Musical.ly-all user accounts and videos were moved to TikTok, and the app formerly known as Musical.ly ceased to exist.

In fact, TikTok was also the most downloaded iOS app in the first quarter of this year, per market research. Musical.ly and TikTok were both popular, but each reigned in different parts of the world, according to Reuters-the former in the Americas and Europe with 100 million monthly active users (who called themselves “Musers”-it’s unclear if that name will survive), and the latter in Asia with 500 million of the same. At the time, ByteDance already owned a similar app, TikTok, which had launched in China in 2016. Musical.ly launched in 2014 (it was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang) and gained a dedicated userbase over the next few years in November 2017 it was acquired by ByteDance, a Beijing-based media and tech company, for a reported $1 billion. What was Musical.ly, and why did it change its name to TikTok?

How to download tiktok sounds