Why The Acapella App Is Blowing Up

The singing grid thingee is everywhere on Instagram and Twitter.

Have you seen those multi-layered, almost Brady Bunch-looking, videos of people singing and accompanying themselves? That's from an app called Acapella, and it's parent company just announced a $1 million round of seed funding today. And if you haven't seen one yet, get ready for a songbook.

Launched just 6 weeks ago, the app has been an instant hit with young people. It allows you to take several videos of yourself, stacking the first videos over next so you can sing over your own backing vocals, until you become an a cappella troupe of one.

It's simple to use, but BYO singing skills (I made one that works in the sense of being several voices playing simultaneously, but not in the sense of being identifiable to any living human as "music"). I asked Ethan Clare, who had posted a really good video made of himself singing "Wanna Be A Baller" by Lil Troy why he likes the app. "Because it's fun, even if you suck!" he told me. (Um. He has not heard my sickly caterwauling in horrifying four-part disharmony.)

The Acapella app taps into a zeitgeist where thanks to the unlikely hit of the Pitch Perfect movies and a reality singing competition show Sing It On, a capella singing is no longer just thought of as something for collegiate boys in ill-fitting matching blazers or a cringe-worthy hobby of Republican senators.

It also steams along on railway tracks that were only recently laid: Twitter and Instagram are the main ways people are getting exposed to the app, and Twitter only added native video this past January. And that's key to the app's strategy.

Acapella comes from a company called Mixcord, which has made several other popular apps that serve as sort of remora fish to popular social networks like Instagram and Twitter. One of its first popular apps was a collage maker designed for Instagram (eventually, Instagram rolled out collages as a feature of its own). So the app, PicPlayPost, stayed one step ahead by allowing people to include video into collages. That, in turn, led to Acapella.

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