There’s a symbiotic — and sometimes frustrating — relationship between social media sites and the creators that depend on them. Platforms need influencers’ and creators’ content to keep consumers on their apps; the creators, in turn, need to be able to reach those audiences to justify creating their content in the first place. Creators want a seamless way to make and disseminate their content while being able to make money; audiences want a bottomless feed of entertaining things to look at. And platforms need to keep both parties relatively happy.
Over the last few months, Instagram has added a slew of features that are helpful for creators, but that might seem slightly bewildering to everyone else. In June, the company announced it would allow users to reorder the posts on their profile grid, shuffling up chronologically arranged static posts. Instagram followed that up with the ability to add individual captions to each slide in a photo set. And today, the company said it will allow users to replace the audio track in previously posted photos and videos with different music, without having to reupload the post with a new song. It’s a feature that regular Instagram users likely won’t find much use in.
“Creators put a lot of thought and care into their posts, but that doesn’t mean they should be locked into every decision they made at the moment they hit publish,” Jimmy O’Keefe, head of creator product marketing at Instagram, said in an emailed statement. “We’ve been building toward this idea that your content should be able to grow and change with you — whether that’s reordering your grid, updating a caption, or now swapping out the music on a post. Replace Audio is the latest step in that direction.”
Image: Instagram
When asked whether updating the audio would give content creators an algorithmic boost, O’Keefe told The Verge in an email that it wouldn’t, but that creators will be able to swap the audio track an unlimited number of times without losing the likes, comments, and shares that they’ve so far amassed. In effect, it gives them a way to retroactively tweak existing content to the viral sounds of any given moment. It also means that audiences may start seeing videos they could have sworn had a different soundtrack previously.
There are two ways of understanding this series of new features. One is that Instagram is making a new pitch to creators, hoping these small but potentially powerful tweaks will entice them to post on Instagram over its competitor, TikTok. The knock-on effect is that it feels more and more like the platform is tipping in the direction of creators rather than casual users.
For the average Instagram user, the idea of replacing last year’s song of the summer with this year’s hit is perplexing; why would you update a post from a year ago to retroactively make it fit current trends? But the feature is intriguing if you’re a content creator or an advertiser: It opens up the possibility that one piece of content can be infinitely recycled. A post that a creator was paid to add a certain song to can be updated annually with a new song, as long as the visual content itself isn’t too dated; a brand can reheat its viral post from two years ago with a trendier audio track rather than reshoot or reupload a new clip. A dancer could A/B test the same clip, but set it to a different song each week. Content becomes less a snapshot in time than an ever-evolving — and ever-monetizable — vehicle for virality.
Meanwhile, the features that come with the new $3.99-per-month premium tier of Instagram seem to target users who are trying to be on Instagram the old-fashioned way: Perks include a “Story Spotlight,” which “give[s] your story priority for your friends,” the ability to send flashier heart emoji to friends, and stories that expire in 48 hours “so the people you care about have more time to see it.” (It also offers features that feed on our more base impulses, like the ability to see how many people watched your story multiple times.) In other words, for a small monthly fee, you get a better shot at reaching the people you actually know and care about.
“Who is Instagram for?” is a question that has been swirling for years, especially as TikTok ushered in the era of short-form video. There was a time not that long ago when users tried to push back on the coming wave of Reels, as well as recommended content from accounts a user didn’t follow that replaced content from friends in their feeds — two features that were mainstays of TikTok. Now these are hallmarks of Instagram too. As the platform has changed, average people and creators alike have complained about not being able to reach their followers, the people with whom they have relationships. The concept of posting as a record of your personal life for friends, family, and acquaintances feels more and more foreign. For the growing class of “creators,” though, posting on Instagram has perhaps never made more sense.