Vine Announced A Bunch Of New Features To Bulk Up Its Music Influence

Since the company’s launch in 2013, Vine has played a major role in breaking artists through major dance crazes like Young Thug's "Stoner" dance, Bobby Shmurda's Shmoney Dance, and this summer's Nae Nae craze, brought to you by Silentó. And on Thursday night, Vine announced the company's multi-tiered attempt to even the music playing field for its creators and help formalize its influence. (The update will be available to users on Friday.)

The first of the products, Snap to Beat, is a new feature that allows users to create the popular music looping vines like:

In a press release sent to The FADER, it’s explained as, “Once you’ve chosen a song by tapping the music note from the Details screen, Snap to Beat identifies how much of the song to use to make a seamless loop and then trims your video to fit that clip.”

Users can now choose from a selection of music picked by Vine to add to their clips and by turning off the feature, you can also edit audio separately. It's worth nothing that users can now import any audio to overlay on their Vines through the app, including sound effects. Before these processes, creating a more-custom Vine was only for pro users who had a familiarity with third-party apps and—in the most extreme cases—real editing software.

Vine is also introducing a “Featured Tracks” page curated by an editorial team that will show users songs that are trending and let them make vines with those songs. Where as something like the Shmoney Dance grew organically, Vine is now stepping in and trying to make sure that its users can easily identify any latest crazes.

Vines are now labeled with music information too. When you see a music note on a Vine, just tape it to get artist and song information.

These steps are an extremely logical move for Vine—so many of popular vines are based on whatever the meme of the week is and this will subtract a layer of difficulty for its newer (and extremely young!) users. By working with the labels and artists directly, the company can skirt any legal hangups they might face with a label that doesn’t want their work endlessly remixed. And for Vine, this is just a step in the right direction for eliminating the need for other video apps that appear on Vine, like Dubsmash.

Carolyn Penner, the head of communications and marketing at Vine, told The FADER in a phone call: “The features going up tomorrow are just a first step that will lead to better music discovery and creation. The release definitely comes with the knowledge that we'll do more.”