Why Instagram Music isn’t Available in Your Region

First introduced in 2018 in over 50 countries, Instagram’s music feature allows users insert a
clip of a song into their Instagram story post.

Users would be able to find the music option below the home screen itself or alternatively
after creating a story by selecting the Music sticker. Upon tapping on Music, users will see
three columns – popular, moods and genres. In moods, there is a list of ten different options
such as party hits, inspirational and more. In genres, options are available such as Rock, and
even regional content language such as Tamil etc.

On top of that, users are able to add filters or even lyrics for their songs, however, lyrics
aren’t available for all songs, but are still available for a high number of them.

It is obvious that certain regions, such as Malaysia are not immediately available to use this
certain function that seems to be trending around the outside world. The reason behind
this is because Instagram needs license to play music.

In regions where the feature is unavailable, there are still a various legal procedures that
have to take place as there is no one law for copyright and privacy issues. It may take some
time before it is finally rolled out on the global scale.

The feature is now only included in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, France,
Canada, and Germany.

However, upon a search on the internet, there are ‘ways’ that people use to curb this
copyright and privacy issue to having Instagram music available to them, even if outside the
regions mentioned above.

1) Storybeat
Storybeat gets its audio tracks from public third-party media service. What seems like a
short term solution may in fact work out for some time, but it is unclear which, licensing
problems or Instagram’s native music support will come knocking on their door first.
Nonetheless, it works and that’s all that matters to the users.

2) VPN
Users can bypass these geo-restrictions by changing their virtual location with a VPN. All
they have to do is to connect ton Instagram with an IP address from any of the participating
countries and Instagram music will become available. It does come with a price though as
VPNs are often not available to download for free.

3) Spotify
Spotify allows its users to share an album art of a song on Instagram stories, but just only
the album art without the music playing in the background. This is one of the ways non-
Instagram music users choose to use as Spotify also provides animated video backgrounds
that will play behind certain album arts in an Instagram stories.