Now You Can Add Music To Instagram Still Image Posts

You would think that seeing an image on Instagram would be enough. It’s either interesting or it’s not. Instagram thinks that you’ll respond differently if there’s music behind it though, so now the platform is allowing you to add it if you want to a still image post.

According to Instagram, “Music is a huge part of expression on Instagram, and we’re excited to provide the ability to add music to Feed photo posts, like you can with Reels and Stories. No matter which format works best to tell your story, you can now add a soundtrack to your favorite photo moments to bring them to life.”

Where To Look

If you look at the image above, there’s now a new ‘Add Music’ option in the post composer that allows you to search for a track to add to your post. You can’t play the entire song though, as you’re limited to a segment of between 5 and 90 seconds.

You would think this would be perfect for artists. Add your album art and play some music for the perfect sample for your followers. At least for now, it doesn’t work that way. The user is limited to licensed music from Meta’s Sound Collection, which is a drag for artists wanting to post their own music.

This is clearly a response to the success of TikTok, but you have to wonder just how useful it will be. After all, it’s a still image and I don’t think you’ll get someone to stay on the post for more than 10 seconds.

One can only hope that Instagram will allow users to post their own music in the future for this to be useful for an artist (and even then, its use might be limited). If not, it will just be another useless feature that doesn’t see much action, which happens a lot on various Meta platforms.