Well here’s a, well, an actual surprise, although it’s likely also one that nobody really asked for. Some Facebook users have reported seeing a new pop up in the app alerting them to the fact that they can now insert music into their comments.
Karaoke Comments
Shared by the undisputed Social Media expert Matt Navarra, you can now add music clips into your post replies, providing people with another way to listen to your favorite tracks and to promote artists within chats as well.
The process is powered by the same system as the music sticker in Stories, enabling users to look up tracks by tapping the music note icon at the right of the comment panel. Upon tapping, users could then select a segment of the track, offering either a sample that could be a means to add further context, link others to new music and artists, make comedic references via Rick-Roll’d clips, and more.
It’s a quirky concept if you think about it, though we can’t really imagine it being popular. It might, but not for very long, or at least not consistently. On the plus side, there are certain applications in which music-comments could come in very handy. Sadly though, as others have voted, it does feel very MySpace-like. In 2018, Facebook tried to go full MySpace and even added an option to add your favorite song to your Facebook profile and pin it to the top. To those that actually had and used MySpace, that definitely served as a nostalgia trip, especially if they could recall that MySpace profiles used to autoplay tracks to profile visitors. On that note, MySpace profiles at least offered incredible levels of personalization that, though are visually obsolete, still serve as good examples to illustrate some key marketing principles.
It’s unclear why Facebook or the people over at Meta are pushing for this, but it could be mainly due to the current trends and shifts, where audio is currently a major factor in increasing engagement – TikTok’s doing it, Snapchat has always done it, and even Twitter is having a go at it. Perhaps by providing users with the additional means to set more comment reference points, Facebook hopes to also build or at least re-ignite engagement. They won’t be the next GIFs anytime soon, but these could have their uses.
The Wrap
Either way, users are starting to see it within the app, so it’ll most likely be an actual addition soon. Though difficult to say for sure, it’ll definitely have a use one way or another. In this case, experimentation can pay off. Then again, given Facebook’s current structure and format, adding in music clips of all things does sound very random and out of place – it could fit it, but it’s essentially ‘odd’ in terms of placement and function.
We already have voice-messaging enabled, which can also double as a sort of ‘music clip’ albeit requiring a bit of skill and creativity, so the novelty of this option is further diminished. We’d even go as far as to say that such an update might be redundant. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the majority of users have to say about this.
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