Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 20

The official integration of music into Instagram came relatively late given the enormous success of Musical.ly, which eclipsed Snapchat’s number of users in 2017 and was purchased by and integrated into TikTok (or douyin in China) in 2018 (Price 2018). TikTok allows teens to lip sync and perform to fifteen-second clips from various songs and audio sources. The affordances and limitations of the platform shaped these performances; recordings could be done in slow or fast time, but no extra audio and no other text or visual elements (emoji or gifs) could be added. This led to a rich, vibrant shared lexicon of hand signs and gestural meaning which tended to add emphasis and depth to performances (Rettberg 2017). Thus, when Instagram added Song Stickers to Instagram Stories in mid-2018, the stickers completely replaced any audio from the story, in keeping with the norms teens and others had learnt and brought with them from using Musical.ly/TikTok/douyin.

Moreover, Instagram’s initial release of the Music Stickers happened just weeks before Musical.ly’s purchase by TikTok and the Musical.ly app was removed (with users forcibly migrated to TikTok), a perfect time to capture some of those Musical.ly users (or ‘musers’) who felt alienated by the forced transition to a new service (Spangler 2018). As with Giphy and GIFs, though, integrating music into Stories is a complicated balance of technical and legal issues. Initially Music Stickers were only released in Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the US, under the umbrella licensing deal Facebook struck with a range of music corporations including Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music as well as a number of independent licensing agencies (Dredge 2018). Instagram users in other countries not covered by this deal initially saw a label indicating music is not available in their region (as discussed in chapter 3). Overall, though, the integration of music, GIFs, and other content into Stories, with little fanfare, shows the ongoing importance of Stories as the format and area where Instagram’s changes, growth and development are most tightly focused.