Instagram turns on the tunes with new music channel

As Apple prepares to relaunch Beats Music at WWDC, another tech giant is throwing its name in the music ring: Instagram, which has just launched a new @Music account designed to capitalize on its popularity among music fans.

The newly-opened account will share music-related photos, lyrics, and videos, relating to both established artists and new acts you haven’t heard of.

Instagram’s @Music endeavour will reportedly be updated six times each week, with the first feature examining Questlove, the Roots drummer, as he describes how to work a room:

When it comes to music, Roots drummer and “Tonight Show” bandleader Questlove (@questlove) is all about the highs and lows. Take DJing, for instance. Give the crowd too many hits and you’ll numb them into the ground; too many non-jams and you’ll drive them off the dance floor. “When I first started, I was just desperate,” he says about the lack of pacing in his shows. “I was like, this is a hit, this is a hit, this is a hit. And you get addicted to the adrenaline rush of, ‘OH MY GOD THIS IS MY SONG.’ You kill them so much. I realized that now I am more obsessed with the opposite. I will put a bad song on and actually watch them filter out the floor. And I will wait two minutes [then play] ‘Uptown Funk’ –– ‘OH MY GOD IT’S MY SONG’ –– and then the scream is bigger than before. –Instagram @music Photo by @questlove

A photo posted by Instagram @music (@music) on Apr 29, 2015 at 6:22am PDT

Instagram isn’t the first social network that has tried to target music lovers. Twitter launched an #Music hashtag in 2013 — which integrated with Spotify, Rdio, and iTunes — although it failed to catch on, and was killed one year later.

This new effort is less about music directly than the culture around it, though, which makes it different from previous efforts.

“Artists are using Instagram as a companion to the art that they’re making,” Jonathan Hull, Instagram’s head of music partnerships, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “Musicians lead really interesting lives, and Instagram has become a way for them to show their fans who they are and to give them a look inside of their world.”

Having certainly traded on that very idea by handing Apple Watch Editions out to a variety of singers in exchange for Instagram publicity, that’s definitely a sentiment Apple can get on board with!