New photo and video editing apps have become social media platforms for college students

They have been featured in Rolling Stone and Business Insider for bursting onto the social media scene. They have gained popularity and millions of users despite many older than 25 being unaware of their existence. They have climbed the Apple app and Google Play stores’ charts peaking in the top ten. All these reasons drove communications and rhetorical studies junior, Dalena Vu to download Musical.ly one spring night while hanging out with friends.

The logos of Musical.ly and VSCO that are prominently displayed on the apps.

“I had heard of VSCO because a lot of my friends use it to edit their pictures but after the third article about Musical.ly popped up on my Facebook feed, I had to check it out,” Vu said.

After scrolling through the karaoke video app and looking at the popular posts she was amazed by the number of people who used the app.

“There are like 17 year olds on Musical.ly with millions of followers and I literally hadn’t heard of the app until I saw articles about it online."

Musical.ly is a video social networking app in which users post 15 second videos most commonly of themselves lip syncing or dancing to chart topping songs. The app launched in 2014 and has been gaining popularity among teenagers and young adults ever since.

Unlike Musical.ly's expressive video platform, VSCO is based more on the users aesthetic. VSCO is a photo editor and community app in which users can edit and post their photos without comments or likes. VSCO possesses a large community of users on Instagram as well as its own app with more than 200 million Instagram photos boasting the VSCO hashtag.

These two new social media platforms are much smaller than their well known counterparts such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram however as their user bases grow, there may be a shift in the prominence of different platforms among SU students.

Broadcast and digital journalism freshman Margot de Riemer is a frequent user of VSCO.

“I love editing pictures and appreciate how you can upload them without worrying about likes," she said. "It’s like building a personal portfolio.”

De Riemer is a frequent user of social media and has developed a large following on her two favorite platforms, Youtube and Instagram. She currently boasts 143,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel and 33,400 followers on her Instagram both under the handle “Margot Lee.”

Even though she has a love of photo sharing and editing, neuroscience and psychology sophomore Christine Rasmussen does not use VSCO. She doesn’t really understand it as a social media platform and prefers to stick to the platforms she knows best.

Rasmussen also boasts a large following on Instagram of 10,600 followers. She favors Instagram because she loves taking pictures and being able to edit and personalize them.

Despite the popularity among many in her age demographic, de Riemer doesn’t see the appeal of Musical.ly.

“I don’t use Musical.ly, but I have seen that a lot of famous Instagrammers use it. I’m not really sure what all the hype is about it,” she said.

Public relations senior Tyra Booker, a former YouTuber who boasted 32,000 subscribers and racked up 2 million views on her channel while she was in high school, favors VSCO over Musical.ly.

“I use VSCO to edit my photos and many of my friends also use it," Booker said. "I found out about the app through the influencers I watch online. The simple platform makes the product easy to use and the content easy to look at."

Booker like Rasmussen has seen Musical.ly but has never used the app herself.

It seems as though Musical.ly still has not caught on with many of SU’s social media savy students even though the app has been growing in popularity among the 13-24 age demographic. VSCO, however, is beginning to gain ground due to its photo editing features and simplified social media concept. The growing popularity of these platforms has not yet impacted the use of larger social media platforms such as Instagram, which is shown to be the platform of choice among many students

After her brief exploration of Musical.ly, Vu decided to stick to the platforms she knows best.

“Musical.ly was interesting even though I still don’t really understand it, but I prefer Facebook and Instagram,” she said. “VSCO is pretty cool however, it’s where you can post those pictures that good but aren’t quite Instagram worthy because you don’t have to worry about the likes.”