News

Instagram Music Is Finally Available In The Middle East

Published

5 years ago

March 9, 2021

instagram music is finally available in the middle east

In 2018, Instagram launched an exciting new feature called Instagram Music. The feature gives users the ability to add music to photos and videos in their Instagram stories. Instagram clearly understands that some things are best said with music, so after years of waiting, the company has made Instagram Music available in the Middle East.

The delay was primarily due to music licensing deals. Instagram is legally required to purchase a license for all the music in order for users to use them within Instagram stories. These music licensing deals are geo-restricted, so Instagram can’t offer the feature to countries they have not obtained a license for.

When the feature was first introduced, it was only available in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, Australia, and France. So users who were not from these specific countries typically got the famous “Instagram Music isn’t available in your region” message when they scrolled through Instagram stories of people who had this feature.

“For that reason, we’ve been working with creators and music partners around the world to help people connect and share how they feel through music across the Facebook family of apps. We see music as a core part of the future of entertainment on Facebook and Instagram. Now there are even more ways for people to create and discover content they’ll love.” said Facebook in a written statement.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

To enjoy this feature, simply open your Instagram app, swipe right, and create a new story. After that, tap on the sticker icon or swipe up. Once this is done, you’ll find an icon that is titled “Music”. You should then be able to choose any of the available songs to add to your story. You can select a part or segment of a song to use in your story. When displaying song lyrics, you’ll have the freedom to change the style, font, color, and size of the text appearing on screen.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.