Banding youth with pop culture

Musical.ly hits the right notes with international expansion

Jacob Sartorius, 14, a US national based in Reston, Virginia, spends several hours a day producing and uploading short personal videos on to Musical.ly, a video-sharing and social networking app owned by an eponymous Shanghai-based startup.

In the age of YouTube and Youku, that's pretty standard for a tech-savvy teenager, you might think. Only, Sartorius has 15.4 million fans or followers - a social media superstar among teenagers and young people under 20, if you will.