Music

Instagram’s music controls cover choosing songs, presenting them visually and working with audio during editing.128 To change an existing post’s soundtrack, Mosseri says to open its three-dot menu, choose Edit and swap the audio.5

Music can communicate a creator’s interests: in an Instagram for Creators profile, baseball creator Jackson Olson explained that sharing songs from favorite musicals helped viewers get to know him.13 Mosseri has also highlighted a pizza business’s use of music as part of entertaining, engaging content.14 For discovery, Mosseri explained that a Reel using audio can appear on that sound’s audio page, where people look for inspiration.15 He also said that photos and carousels with music qualify to appear in the Reels tab, giving people another place to encounter them.16 Shared songs can become a focus for participation: Meta’s Newsroom reported in December 2024 that “Jale 2” had been used in 9.7 million Reels.17

Instagram’s music guidance explains that agreements with rights holders limit the amount of recorded music that can be included in videos and Live broadcasts.3 The detailed agreements are confidential, so Instagram publishes general guidance to help people plan their videos.3 That guidance permits music in Stories and recordings of traditional live musical performances, such as filming an artist or band performing live.3

Meta’s research and patents explore matching music to content and finding videos with similar sounds.202122 One Meta patent describes an audio-only storytelling system that suggests background music from a story’s tone, such as eerie music for a scary story.21 Another Meta patent describes comparing what a video shows with features of available music, then ordering possible soundtracks by how closely they match.22 Meta’s Reels research demonstrated that similar audio could connect videos with very different images, including videos built around shared music and dance patterns.20 Meta’s March 2021 research account placed that example within a system that learned patterns to suggest Reels related to recent viewing while filtering out near-duplicates.20