[Updated] IT’S OFFICIAL: Musical.ly has partnered with Apple Music. In a rare outside partnership, Apple Music will be one of the services delivering songs to the popular short music video creation app.
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Starting today, Apple Music will begin delivering song snippets to popular music video app Musical.ly. As of last year Musical.ly had more than 100 million users and raised 100 million at a $500 million valuation.
“Connecting with Musical.ly gives Apple a new marketing venue: The app will promote Apple’s paid service to its own users, and will allow paying Apple Music subscribers to listen to full songs within the app,” according to Recode who first reported the partnership.
UPDATE: “A number of other companies have reached out to us, understanding that it would be very valuable for them to partner with us, and we believe it would be very valuable to partner with them,” Musical.ly President Alex Hoffmann told Billboard when asked whether the company would explore similar partnerships with Spotify, Pandora and other streamers. “So we are going to have these conversations. But it was important to us to work with a partner we had worked with before – we’ve worked with Apple on other occasions – and there are other Apple-Musical.ly partnerships on the horizon.”
Early this month, the UK’s 7Digital announced a renewed deal with Musically doubling the number of territories that it provides music for the app from 30 to 60. That deal is apparently unaffected by the Apple Music partnership.
“To confirm the announcement we made two weeks ago, we’ve just re-signed a deal with Musical.ly, extending the number of territories,” 7digital CEO Simon Cole told Music Ally. “We are unaffected by any other deals they may be doing with third parties, and that we will earn more money from Musical.ly this year than we did last year.”