Instagram Notes: Now with music!

On Tuesday, the Meta-owned company introduced two new features for Instagram Notes — a.k.a. the small text bubble that pops up next to your friends' names on the DM page of Instagram. What was once home for only short text and emojis now includes music and translations.

You can now share a 30-second clip of a song in your note — like an auditory version of the AIM away messages of long ago. You can also add a caption to the music note to clearly reach your desired audience (lovers, ex-lovers, friends, enemies, etc.). Adding a song is pretty much as intuitive as you might think: Simply click the "plus" button by your profile photo on the DM page and, right below where you'd normally craft your note, you'll see a music note. Click that music note, and you'll find yourself on a page similar to the one you see when you add a song to an Instagram Story. Search for your song, choose your 30-second clip, add some text if you want, and click "done" at the top right corner to post.

Instagram is also allowing users to see the translation of a Note by tapping it. Simply tap the note you want to translate, and, boom, translate it.

Instagram rolled out Notes in December 2022, and users' reaction has been a rousing chorus of apathy from a great majority of Instagram users. But teens seem to really like the feature.

According to Meta, teens create Notes at 10 times the rate of adults in the U.S. Over 100 million teen accounts have shared a Note in the past month and a half, and about a fifth of Notes created by teens get a reply. So it makes sense that the new feature would be geared to the very demographic that seems to use it the most.