Facebook Working on Lasso App to Take on Tik Tok, Musical.ly: Report

Facebook is reportedly working on a new standalone app that looks to directly give competition to Tik Tok/Musical.ly. This standalone app will be called Lasso, and a dedicated team is working behind it to make it a reality. This app will have features similar to Tik Tok, and will largely be an app-version of the Lip Sync Live feature launched in June this year. The Lip Sync Live feature was recently opened up for Pages as well.

TechCrunch reports that Facebook is working on a standalone product that can record and share videos of users lip syncing and dancing to songs. Citing current and former Facebook employees as sources, the report states that the app is being developed by members of the video and Watch team, which is being led by Brady Voss, Facebook's Principal Lead Product Designer.

This app will go head to head with Musical.ly, now acquired by Tik Tok. "It's basically TikTok/Musically. It's full-screen, built for teens, fun and funny and focused on creation. A lot of what they're doing is just trying to be cool," a person familiar with the matter told the publication.

The report further states that Facebook was interested in building a Musical.ly competitor since 2016, and it even made an investigating team that looked into the popularity of the lip syncing app. However, suspicions of Musical.ly not being as popular as it claimed to be, got Facebook to work at an easy pace. The company, earlier this year, released a lip sync live feature within Facebook that allows users to select hit songs to share on their live streams. As the music plays, those tuning in will see their friends sing, dance, or do whatever else the music inspires them to do.

This was introduced to leverage its recent licensing deals with music labels, and the Lasso app will look to capitalise on it a bit more. To this effect, Facebook even introduced music stickers in Instagram, and may roll out more music-related features in the future as well.