Facebook-owned Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet it was launched in October 2010 exclusively for iOS users and an Android version was launched much later in April 2012. The app allows users to upload photos and videos, which can be edited with various filters, and organized with tags and location information. An account’s posts can be shared publicly or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse other users’ content by tags and locations, and view trending content. Users can “like” photos, and follow other users to add their content to a feed.
After its launch in 2010, Instagram rapidly gained popularity, with one million registered users in two months, 10 million in a year, and 1 billion as of May 2019. In the app’s latest update, Instagram users can now add lyrics to the music in their Stories. This update is the result of parent company Facebook‘s deals with record labels, allowing users to choose from an extensive media library including Calvin Harris, guns n’ Roses, and Demi Lovato, as well as the popularity of people finding their ways of adding soundtracks. Before this feature, people would play music in another app, or they simply had it playing in the background. Now to add lyrics to a Story, users first select a song from the app’s music library, then while pinpointing the section of the song they want to use lyrics will now automatically pop up.
Users can then customize the animation and text style they want before adding. To promote the feature, Instagram enlisted singer Billie Eilish to record a demo video in which she shares the lyrics to her song “My Strange Addiction.”Instagram’s move to add the Music feature shows that Facebook has set its sights on reaching out to younger audiences that have become the core audience of TikTok.In the last few years, TikTok has emerged as a platform where people can upload short homemade videos with music overlays and lip syncs. Because of its light nature and the number of people subscribing to it, the app soon started drawing a lot of influencers away from Instagram and onto TikTok’s addictive platform. But with Instagram also offering the same feature now and coupling it with its photo-sharing feature, there is no reason to believe that it won’t emerge as a major contender against TikTok in terms of popularity.
