’Ditty’ launches on Facebook Messenger to turn texts into songs

Music creation service Zya has launched Ditty, an app that sings personal messages to the melody of famous songs, on Facebook Messenger.

Zya is lead by ex-Chairman/CEO of Virgin Records and multi-Grammy Award winning producer/songwriter Matt Serletic.

Officially announced today at Facebook's F8 Developer Conference, Ditty is an audio telegram of sorts; users send messages of up to 70 characters, select from a track list which includes Sia’s Chandelier, OneRepublic’s Counting Stars and Cyndi Lauper’s Girls Just Want to Have Fun, and Ditty generates a lyric video to send to friends.

Ditty is the only music creation program to launch natively through Messenger and is licensed through Sony/ATV and EMI.

"We couldn't be more excited to launch Ditty on the Messenger Platform,” said Matt Serletic today. “With hundreds of millions of people communicating via Messenger every day, Ditty will quickly make the world a more musical place."

Founded in 2008 and launched in 2011, Zya is the first product from Matt Serletic’s company Music Mastermind, which he co-founded with Bo Bazylevsky, former Global Head of EM Corporate Trading at Chase/JP Morgan. Music Mastermind was formed with the help of Dean Serletic (who discovered Matchbox Twenty), US High Yield trader Andrew Bazylevsky, and Wall Street veteran/musician Terry Solomone. 

Ditty was initially discussed at SXSW during Dean Serletic’s mentor session on March 16.

Ditty has launched with a free option of 10 free songs but after that another 16 can be purchased for 99 cents and used to create as many Dittys as a user likes. More tracks are said to be added at a later date. Ditty users can save their custom lyric videos to their camera roll for later.

Matt Serletic entered discussions with Facebook in January and ditched the original plan to launch Ditty around two months from today. Back in 2011 Music Mastermind raised US$10.8m in a funding round especially for Ditty.

The app is compatible with iOS and Android devices, Ditty for Messenger is available to download for free in the App Storeand Google Play.