Instagram Stories Hits 400 million Daily Users

Instagram Stories has surpassed 400 million daily active users, the company confirmed today — up from the 250 million users it said it counted last June. For comparison’s sake, predecessor Snapchat last reported 191 million daily active users, meaning that Instagram’s base Story is now more than twice that tally.

At the same time that it shared the impressive milestone, Instagram Stories are about to get even busier, with the addition of licensed music. Starting today, users will be able to add background music to their posts on their Stories. Now, users can browse a growing library of thousands of songs according to mood, genre, or popularity — and then fast-forward or rewind through a track to find the part of the song that they want to feature.

A music icon will show up with the rest of the stickers, and tapping it will bring up a list of popular songs. A play icon next to each track allows you to preview each one, and a song can even be selected before recording a video, by swiping to the music option. You can skip through tracks to choose an exact part, too, before taking a video with it in the background.

Song titles, artists, and album art will appear on any story that has music added to it. There’s no mention of how many tracks there are to choose from, or how they’re sourced, but more will be added on a daily basis, so there should be plenty to choose from. It’s unclear when this feature will go live in the Android app, but it shouldn’t be too long.

Instagram opted to incorporate music into Stories given that it’s a major part of the platform, with 45% of the community following a verified music account. Furthermore, three of the five most-followed accounts on all of Instagram are musicians, the company said in a blog post.

The latest new feature, it’s now available on iOS with version 51, and will soon be coming to Android.