Instagram Stories Now Include Music

Instagram stories have become increasingly popular in the last year. While they originally had a lot of competition with Snapchat stories, Instagram has added many features, including polls, filters, and Boomerang, that have helped the platform gain more traction. The most recent feature to be added to Instagram stories is music.

On June 28th, Instagram launched this new feature, and people are loving it. Instead of users only having the option of playing music from another app while recording a video, they can add up 15 seconds of music on Instagram to their video after it has been recorded. The music does not come from the user’s own library, but rather Instagram’s library, so while there are thousands of songs to choose from, the options for music isn’t as extensive as the libraries of streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify.

There are two ways to use music in your Instagram story:

1. Select “music” from the options of the type of story you are creating (the same place you choose between boomerang, live, normal, etc.)
2. First create your story and then tap the smiley-face icon in the top right corner and select "music".

In either case, after selecting “music”, you will be given a lengthy list of music to choose from, with the option of narrowing it down by mood and genre. You can choose to either start the song from the beginning or scroll to somewhere in the middle of the song. If you are adding the music to a picture, you can select the duration (up to 15 seconds) of the clip of the song as well. When your followers watch your story, they will see a sticker showing the song title and artist.

As far as royalties are concerned, there are still questions in the industry about how Facebook (the owner of Instagram) will monetize the content.

We are very excited about this new feature and think it will help increase the popularity of Instagram stories even more. What do you think?