A Chinese company has bought the popular social video app Musical.ly for $1 billion. People pronounce Musical.ly as "musically". The company is called Bytedance. It hopes it will become the first Chinese social media site to be a global brand. The Musical.ly app started in 2014. It has 60 million active monthly users. The app is very popular with young people. App users can record and share 15-second videos of themselves lip-syncing to popular songs. They can edit the videos, make funny faces, change the speed, add filters and play the videos backwards. App users are called "musers".
Musical.ly is the next big thing across the world. It will probably be a part of life for young people. They will share them on their mobile phones. Bytedance's chief executive explained why his company bought the app. He said: "By integrating Musical.ly's global reach with Bytedance's massive user base in…key Asian markets, we are creating a significant global platform for our content creators and brands to engage with new markets." Bytedance also owns a huge news app, called Today's Headlines. This popular news service has 120 million active daily users.