For frequent Instagram posters, it might seem like the app has let you add music to posts forever. But in reality, the company only rolled the feature out back in 2022. (If that doesn’t sound right to you, you’re just misremembering—you have been able to add music to Stories since 2018.) Over the past four years, it has been possible to attach a track to your pictures to set a mood for your post. It’s a bit of an Instagram staple at this point: if you use the app with your volume up, you can’t really scroll through your friends’ posts without hearing a whiplash of songs.
In all that time, however, adding a song was all or nothing. If you posted with a particular tune, that was the permanent soundtrack to your post. Any regrets you might have about that particular song could only be remedied by deleting the post entirely—a bit of an extreme step in most cases. As such, you might have posts in your feed with tracks you don’t care for anymore, but since you don’t want to take down the pictures altogether, you’ve had to leave them up and accept your past poor choices. But no more!
Now you can change the songs on any of your Instagram posts
On Tuesday, Instagram announced that songs on posts and carousels are now editable. You can swap out songs using Instagram’s new “Replace Audio” feature, which lets you change the music on a post without deleting it or affecting any likes or comments. It’s a simple change, but one that Instagram’s user base will likely receive positively, and positive sentiment is definitely something the company needs in the wake of outcry over another high-profile feature that briefly let users generate AI images with posts from any public account. The company has since removed that option, and seems to be focused on adding new features users might actually want.
Changing the songs on your posts is relatively simple: Any time you want to swap out the song on one of your past posts, you can tap the two lines above the picture, tap “Edit,” then choose the new “Original audio” option that appears in the menu. From here, you can change the song to anything in Instagram’s library, and, presumably, return here as many times as you like to swap it out again.
