As traditional forms to do research, discover talent and world news fade out, more and more Gen Z and millennials are turning to social platforms as their main search engine to gather updated information. Dominant social platform, Instagram, has slowly over the past few years begun integrating different market segments onto their application to allow users one single epicenter to do everything!
If you think about Instagram when it initially started, it was just a digital community space to share content with followers. Fast forward a couple of years and Instagram has become a platform that hosts integrated in-app shopping, business management possibilities, and most recently a space to discover music through reels.
Instagram reels, which was launched by Meta in 2020 as a response to better compete with popular short-video app TikTok, has found its way onto millions of users’ feeds. But what would reels be if it doesn’t incorporate catchy music to go along with trendy dances, how-to videos, or compilations?
Users around the globe are finding new music daily, through songs added by content creators to compliment the context of their reels for other viewers to be re-used. The app, which horizontally displays song titles on the bottom left and a vertical moving cover art icon on the bottom right, allows viewers to save music directly in a stored album on the app itself.
How can you save your favorite songs directly on your smartphone?
There’s an even smarter feature, that very few users know about on Instagram, which enables viewers to create a personalized color QR code that’s downloaded directly onto your phone’s camera roll.
How to do it?
How to do it is quite easy and a very underrated feature that the app provides. By clicking on the cover art icon on the bottom right corner of a reel, users are sent to the song information as well as other suggested reels where the song has been used. Now instead of saving the song on Instagram’s embedded “saved music” file, click the 3 dotted icon on the top right corner where the information of the Instagram song is displayed.
Afterward, tap QR code and wait for it cause here comes the cool part, select from a range of 5 colors of your choosing. Instagram will first show you a preview of the QR code that will be generated and follow by selecting Save to Camera Roll! Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?!
Follow up and see the saved code, where people can scan this code with their smartphones to listen to the audio. The only snag of this feature is that it opens the saved song again on Instagram, instead of suggesting music apps, like Spotify, to download and add it to your personal playlist.
It makes sense for Instagram to do this as they continuously want to have as many users as they can drive traffic back to the application instead of to other apps. But we can’t help to predict that if users are starting to discover music via reels that there might be a future opportunity for the application to dedicate a whole integrated section of just Instagram music. Now that would be one heck of a seamless experience!
Music streaming app Spotify is currently still dominating the whole market segment, but with users finding new and innovative ways to discover trendy music without having to pay for a monthly subscription, Spotify might have a competitor on the horizon.
Comment below and let us know your thoughts on a potential Instagram Music section and how you find ways to discover new songs.
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