Last year Facebook struck licensing deals with the major record labels which involves Facebook owned Instagram to benefit from it. The android app codes read that very soon the stories will welcome music stickers letting all users to add soundtracks to their stories. Rumour has that Instagram
is also testing a way to automatically detect a song you’re listening to and display the artist and song title as just a visual label.
Adding music to stories would put Instagram further ahead of major time rivals Snapchat and the music in the background itself brings them in competition with teen lip syncing app sensation Musically. Both Facebook and Instagram also announced being able to share content from third-party apps such as Spotify, SoundCloud and GoPro onto the stories. All these together could make Instagram the new flashy toy for music discovery while being the #1 spot for visual social media. users may also be able to search for songs, genres and musical moods to add as music stickers, with music presumably being played while users look at their stories.
Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch about three other big features: Focus mode for shooting portraits, QR-scannable Nametags for following people and video calling going head on with Snapchat once again.
[caption id="attachment_5292" align="aligncenter" width="629"]
Instagram code snippets found by TechCrunch.[/caption]
The music overlay stickers can be searched using tabs for “Genres,” “Moods,” and “Trending.” It is interesting to see the fact that Instagram owned up to the Focus, Nametags and Video Calling features all within three months of TechCruch's reporting but have made no comment on the music additions to the application.
Several apps like Sounds and Soundtracking have tried to be play “Instagram for music.” The reason, users don’t want a whole separate app for this and Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms can bury cross-posts of this content. Stories that originally have visuals that are easily skippable, natively created and consumed in your default social app could succeed.