Key Takeaways Instagram and Spotify have announced a new integration that lets users add songs they find in Reels or posts to their Spotify library in a couple of taps. Expectedly, this feature requires users to link their Spotify account with Instagram. Rival social media app TikTok already offers a similar integration with Spotify.
Social media platforms have come a long way since the days of MySpace, with apps like TikTok and Instagram fighting for our collective attention spans today. It's not uncommon for a social media app to join forces with another product like Spotify to offer a convenient new way of engagement. TikTok currently does this by letting users add songs they find to their Spotify library. Instagram is now taking a leaf out of TikTok's book and offering a similar feature through its mobile apps.
Related All my social media apps are starting to look the same, and that's not okay
The social media landscape gets more and more boring by the day
This handy feature is currently available on Instagram for Android and iOS, and it works exactly as you would expect. Whenever you're viewing a Reel or an Instagram post that contains music, tapping the box on the bottom right of the screen takes you to the song info page. In addition to providing details about the song, this page now contains an Add button with a Spotify logo etched on it.
Source: Instagram/Spotify
Users will be guided to link Spotify with Instagram if they haven't done so already, and it's a pretty seamless process beyond that. Spotify confirmed the development in a statement shared with 9to5Mac (via Engadget) while also providing imagery that explains how this new addition works.
Not Instagram's only music-related addition Source: Alessandro Paluzzi - Threads
Instagram recently started letting users display their favorite song on their profile, bringing back memories of Myspace for people old enough to remember the platform. This feature does not depend on Spotify, though. Instead, users could conveniently select a 30-second portion of the song they like and have it displayed on top of their profile for visitors.
As Engadget notes, this isn't the only integration between Spotify and Instagram, with developer and app reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi unearthing a feature that would let Instagram users "continuously share" what they're listening to on Spotify. An update shared by Paluzzi in early September suggested that work on this inclusion was ongoing, though we haven't heard much about it since then.