Last week, Instagram announced that it was planning to jazz up Stories with content from other apps, including Spotify. According to an APK teardown by TechCrunch—all the cool kids are doing them now—music integration into Instagram's Stories will be even deeper than previously thought. New "music stickers" may allow you to play clips of selected songs in your Stories.

TechCrunch was tipped off to the changes in the APK's code by Ishan Agarwal, who found several new strings containing the word "music" indicating the hidden existence of a new "Search Music" feature, which is alleged to include tabs for navigating content, including "genre" and "moods." The behavior for this new feature obviously can't be tested, but it is believed it should allow for users of the service to search for and select music to include in the platform's Stories, including videos and (potentially) photos.

Facebook has been in negotiations with record labels for some time, so it isn't known if this new music integration would be an entirely first-party solution, or if it might be connected to a third-party service—as in the case of the company's recent work with Spotify.

This new music sticker feature hasn't been announced yet, but TechCrunch notes that Agarwal has a good history when it comes to spotting these unreleased features in his APK teardowns for the Instagram Android app. It's probably just a matter of time until the company acknowledges these new "music stickers." In the meantime, you can likely bet that SnapChat is hard at work on its own version of the concept (if it wasn't already before).

Source: TechCrunch