Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team announced the Bars app Friday, which lets rappers record over professionally produced beats and share their performances.
CNET
A new app from Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team lets you perform a rap over a studio-recorded beat. Called Bars, the app lets you share videos of your raps with your followers, post to another social media account, or just save to your phone. Bars launched Friday and currently has a waiting list for its beta trial.
The new app, reported earlier by TechCrunch, puts Facebook in competition with the corner of TikTok dedicated to rap. It follows the team’s release of Collab in December (after a beta test announced in May). The Collab app lets musicians work together on recordings, and it also drew comparisons to TikTok.
Bars seeks to make it easier to record and share raps, in part by removing the need for a professional studio to lay down a good beat. “Audio production tools can be complicated, expensive and difficult to use,” Bars Community Manager DJ Iyer said in a blog post Friday. “With BARS, you can select one of our professionally-created beats, write lyrics and record yourself dropping bars.”
According to the Verge, the app lets you mark yourself as beginner, intermediate or advanced. Beginners can use an auto-rhyme dictionary, and advanced users can access freestyle mode and work off of eight randomly selected words to prompt a rap over 16 bars of beats.
The app also aims to give rappers a way to perform and interact with other musicians while local venues are shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic. However, Android users will be left out for the time being, as the app is only available for iOS.