In case you’ve forgotten about Flipagram, we told you about them back in July when they raised $70 million and said they had 30 million users. The company started out as an app to create quick slide shows to share on services like Facebook and Instagram. Seeing ridiculous traction, the team added all of the components the product needed to be its own social network.
It’s working.
Today, the company is allowing its users to create Flips that last up to 60 seconds, instead of the previous 30 seconds. I spoke with Flipagram’s CEO, Farhad Mohit, this week and he told me that since most of the Flips created on the platform used up the previous 30 second, this will be a popular move with the community. How can they do it since most music licenses only allow 30 second clips to be shared? Relationships, Mohit tells me.
The app is consistently listed in the top 100 free apps on the App Store in the United States, and currently sits at #81.
Who’s using it? Mohit tells me:
Think of our community as leaders or people who are on the cutting edge. 50%+ are millennials and Gen Z’s memorializing the stories of their lives. The other 40% are all sorts of other users, savvy adults and kids.
Flipagram has every hallmark of an Instagram or Twitter, attracting creative talents who love to share, brands who want to get in front of important eyeballs and celebrities who want to keep in touch with their fans. Since Flipagram has a focus on music, musicians can think of Flipagram as a stream of commercials for their music with fan photos and videos attached. There’s a storytelling component that’s missing from other services, too. It’s quite genius.
I asked Mohit for his favorite Flipagram and he shared one with me that is a “Happy Birthday” wish from a daughter to her father, featuring the song “Knock Knock” by Lenka:
Very sweet, of course. It also has 1,304,743 views, which has to make the original musician, Lenka, extremely happy.
This happens to be my favorite holiday Flip so far:
Like Vine and YouTube, stars are emerging on the platform. It’s pretty cool to run through some of them, as they’ve mastered the art of syncing media to music…which are way more interesting than watching boring slideshows of photos. One such standout is Roberto De Jesus who has over 130,000 followers on the service. His stop-motiony stuff is pretty rad.
The best part of the Flipagram’s music component is that you can rely on the service to surface new and interesting artists, which are featured in a way that other services simply can’t. The top 15 songs used on the platform this year reflects that, as well as the demographic that really digs Flipagram:
1. My Main (feat. Ty Dolla $ign) by Mila J, 2.7M Flips
2. Cheerleader by Omi, 2.2M Flips
3. Time of Our Lives by Pitbull & Ne-Yo, 1.7M Flips
4. All of Me by John Legend, 1.6M Flips
5. Lips Are Movin by Meghan Trainor, 1.5M Flips
6. Love Me Like You Do by Ellie Goulding, 1.5M Flips
7. I Really Like You by Carly Rae Jepsen, 1.5M Flips
8. Happy by Pharrell Williams, 1.4M Flips
9. Ayo by Chris Brown X Tyga, 1.3M Flips
10. Love Don’t Change by Jeremih, 1.2M Flips
11. L.A.LOVE (la la) by Fergie, 1.1M Flips
12. Hotline Bling by Drake, 1.1M Flips
13. Take Me to Church by Hozier, 1.1M Flips
14. One Last Time by Ariana Grande, 1.0M Flips
15. Photograph by Ed Sheeran, 1.0M Flips
Listening to 30, and now 60 second clips of these songs is way more interesting than finding a video with lyrics on YouTube or trying to piece an entire song together out of clips on Instagram. Also, following these stories and replaying them certainly beats them coming and going on a service like Snapchat…an app that most certainly shares a userbase with Flipagram.
To attract talent to the platform, Flipagram is going to have to figure out a way to compensate both the Flipagram creators and the musicians. Right now, you can buy tracks through the app on iTunes, but it would be interesting to see if the company gets into reselling or streaming the music itself…say through a Pro service. If you pay a certain amount every month, you could pull a song out of a Flip into a playlist to go back and listen to later. For popular creators on the platform, maybe they get a few cents on every million reflips or views. That’s most certainly something that would get me to pay for a service outside of Spotify.
I mean, this kind of artistic work sells music:
Can Flipagram keep fans coming to the platform and musicians interested in engaging? So far, so good.
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