Instagram has announced that you can now share Spotify tracks to your Stories with a 15-second audio preview included. For years, users were previously able to share a song, but it would just show up as a silent sticker with a link. This forced people to use workarounds like adding the song separately with Instagram"s music sticker, or, for the truly dedicated, screen recording the song playing on Spotify and uploading that video.
Now with sound natively supported, your followers can hear a snippet of the track you are sharing without having to click away and leave the app.
This move puts Spotify ahead of some of its competitors, at least in this aspect. Take Google"s offering, which YouTube Music tested back in 2020. That feature finally arrived in 2022, letting users share tracks to Instagram and Snapchat. As of January 2025, users still complain about the no sound issue when they share from YouTube Music.
Alongside the music update, Instagram is also rolling out new fonts for Stories and Reels. The platform is kicking things off with a limited-time font handwritten by singer Rosalia. If you use it, you can even unlock some custom symbols she drew by typing specific things, like "<3", "***", and ":-)"
In other Spotify news, the company recently updated its podcast play count system after creators got incredibly pissed off. Spotify had decided to show the exact number of plays on every single podcast episode, which sounds fine until you realize it made smaller, independent shows look like failures right next to the giants.
Some creators felt this was a garbage move that hurt discovery for anyone new. So, after the backlash, Spotify walked it back. Now, an episode’s play count will only show up publicly after it hits 50,000 plays, and even then, it just shows a milestone like "50K" or "100K", not a precise number.
Via: TechCrunch