Confirmed: Instagram’s music stickers are legit and they launch today

You can now soundtrack your Instagram stories, as the new Music Sticker feature rolls out in Australia and New Zealand this morning.

Thanks to licensing deals with major record labels recently struck by Facebook, the new feature allows users to choose songs from an Instagram library sorted into ‘Genre’ ‘Mood’ and ‘What’s Popular’ categories.

You can search and add songs to your post by tapping the sticker button and selecting the music sticker, scrubbing through the track to find the perfect excerpt.

iOS users can also select a song prior to capturing the video by swiping to the Music format in their camera, available to Android soon. 

Songs will play automatically when viewing Stories, with users able to tap a sticker with the song title and artist.

Conceivably, the feature will encourage more users to wear headphones and turn the sound on when using Instagram, which could be a massive benefit for advertisers who now have the opportunity to be heard as well as seen.

The ability to pre-select the song section and film to it in real time opens opportunities for lip-syncing and adds to the expanding opportunities for music inclusion that we saw with the release of IGTV’s long-form video format.

This feature, in particular, could rival the lip-syncing app Musical.ly, and is also a challenger to Snapchat’s new third-party developer tool ‘Snap Kit’ which, in partnership with Pandora, has been rolling out in the US.

Coupled with Instagram Stories’ new platform for sharing posts from third-party apps like Spotify and SoundCloud, the feature could potentially make Instagram a new platform for music discovery.

That being said, Instagram was unable to confirm the process by which they select which tracks to recommend to users through their categories, other than to say songs are identified based on information from “across the music industry”.

They were also unable to confirm whether geo-targeting would be used to support local artists through recommendations, or whether Australian artists have been included in the library for the launch. 

However, the press release says that they're "adding new songs to our music library every day."

It will be interesting to see whether Instagram will use its new feature to support the Australian music scene and promote new music discovery to its 400+ million daily users.

The new feature is available as part of Instagram version 51 in Australia and New Zealand, as well as France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and US, with plans to make the feature globally available in the future.