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Instagram makes use of Facebook music licences in Stories

By | Published on Friday 29 June 2018

Instagram

When Facebook announced its big, advance-heavy, bloody-long-time-coming licensing deals with various music companies and collecting societies earlier this year, it was keen to state that said deals also covered Facebook’s other businesses. You know, like lovely Instagram and that whole Oculus VR thing that they keep banging on about.

Well, now Instagram is making good use of those licenses. The social media app has added a music library to its Stories feature and made a swipe at lip-sync app Musical.ly in the process. Announcing that 400 million Instagram users are now using Stories every day, the Facebook app added the new music functionality yesterday. Users can pick tracks to feature in their posts and select what bit of that track they want to use.

While this means that people can add music to any old shitty video they like, the play for Musical.ly’s turf comes in the fact that you can select your music before you record your video. This leaves you free to lip-sync along with it if you so wish.

Music features of this kind are already being tested on Facebook itself, of course, but they are possibly more likely to take off in a major way on Instagram. The ability to add music is now available on the platform’s iOS app in “selected countries” and it promises an update to its Android app “soon”.



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