Instagram celebrates its latest milestone by letting you add music to your Story
Instagram Stories has blown through another big milestone. The nearly two-year-old feature now boasts 400 million daily users, the company announced on Thursday.
To celebrate, the app is adding a feature that's likely to generate a lot of excitement among its Stories-loving users: the ability to add musical soundtracks to your posts.
The feature, which is rolling out to iOS and Android today, lets users add music to Stories via a new music sticker, which will appear next to GIF, location, and other sticker add-ons. Instagram says its library has thousands of songs available, and you can listen to previews before you decide to add them to your post.
On iOS, users can also opt to choose a song before shooting a photo or video. That feature will also roll out to Android "soon," according to Instagram.
Once you've selected a song, a slider tool lets you choose exactly which part of the track you want to play during your Story.
The update is significant, as the app has never had this kind of soundtrack feature built-in. It announced an integration with Spotify at F8, but that feature directs users to listen to songs in Spotify -- not in the Instagram post itself.
That's likely because having built-in playlists available requires licensing deals, which can be complex and expensive. It's not clear who Instagram has partnered with on the feature.
When asked about the nature of the licensing for the music, a spokesperson said "Facebook Inc. has been partnering with music companies around the world to bring music to more experiences across the Facebook family (including Instagram)."
The update also highlights how important Stories has been to Instagram, which just announced reaching 1 billion users last week. Since adding Stories to Instagram in 2016, Facebook's added the feature to Messenger, WhatsApp, and the main Facebook app and the company said earlier this year Stories it predicts Stories will be more popular than feeds sometime in the next year.
Needless to say, none of that is good news for Snap, the company who, you know, invented Stories. Snapchat now counts 191 million daily users, or less then half of Instagram Stories alone. Still, Evan Spiegel's company has made it clear it willing to fight and the company may be even taking a few cues from Facebook pretty soon.
Topics Facebook Instagram Social Media
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
