The Facebook timeline is about to get dark, my friends. That is, if you are not stoked for your mum and your cousin and that kid from high school to start posting live videos of themselves lip syncing to “God’s Plan” by Drake.
Image: Facebook
Facebook announced today that it is rolling out a new feature – Lip Sync Live – which lets users… lip sync live.
The feature isn’t groundbreaking. In fact, it’s ripped straight from Musical.ly, an app popular with teens that lets you upload video selfies lip syncing to popular songs. The app has reportedly acquired and retained 60 million monthly active users, so it isn’t hard to imagine why Facebook might want to roll out a nearly identical feature to its own platform that’s apparently being swiftly dumped by the youths.
But just because the teens liked something on one app doesn’t mean they will come running back to Facebook for something identical. It’s hard to capitalise on a culture that happened organically in a space free from the olds.
Like Musical.ly, Facebook is working with artists and music companies to ensure the songs used on Lip Sync Live don’t lead to copyright violations. If they do, Facebook will mute your video – unless you dispute the copyright and it’s approved by Facebook’s rights manager tool, TechCrunch reported.
Facebook’s blog post announcing the new feature noted that songs such as “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, “Havana” by Camila Cabello, “Happier” by Ed Sheeran, and “God’s Plan” by Drake will be available for users to impressively open and close their mouths to.
With the success of Musical.ly, it’s clear that this is a feature the people (read: The teens) want. But on Facebook, it will probably be the feature that pushes the teens away in droves after they see their feeds flooded with parents pretending to rap Drake.