Instagram is making it easier for users to express themselves through music, videos, and says it’s “exploring” ways to support posts that can appear on your profile without making it into your followers’ feed. The feature, which launched today, lets users automatically share the title and artist of the Spotify song they’re currently listening to in their Instagram Notes — temporary status updates that appear above your profile photos in Instagram DMs.
Meta spokeswoman Christine Pai confirmed that starting next week, Instagram will be giving users the ability to rearrange the order of posts in their profile grid. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri had previously hinted at the feature in January.
In a new blog post, Mosseri said it’s part of his “Anyway” campaign, which aims to help “reduce the pressure and encourage creativity” for creators by helping them share their musical tastes and gain confidence in creating content before publishing it to their followers.
Unlike Instagram’s feature, which allows users to manually add a song clip for followers to listen to, Spotify’s new feature constantly updates the song title in real time to give followers a better idea of the creator’s musical tastes and mood. It also gives Instagram another place to place an “add to Spotify” button as part of a partnership that Meta announced last November.
Mosseri said the platform is also working on new features that aim to help users deal with “the excitement and nervousness that comes with releasing something.” The video experiment, which allowed some creators to test their videos on a new audience before sharing them with their followers, is now available to everyone. Mosseri said 40 percent of creators who tested the feature started posting videos more often, encouraging Instagram users to explore their creativity without having to share failed video ideas with their friends and fans.
