2005, Is That You? Instagram Tests MySpace-Esque Profile Song Feature

MySpace may be little more than a relic of internet history, but one aspect of the social network’s legacy may live on.

First spotted by(Opens in a new window) mobile developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, Instagram appears to be testing the ability to add a song to your profile.

Paluzzi on Monday teased the fresh feature, which is still under internal development. By Tuesday, he was Rickrolling the web with a playable version of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” direct from his IG profile. “Testing… this is the caption,” Paluzzi wrote.

Internet users of a certain age immediately made the connection to the early-aughts social media platform MySpace, which launched in 2003 with the option to select a background song that would autoplay when anyone visited your profile. Mercifully, the Instagram song does not appear to autoplay.

(Credit: Alessandro Paluzzi/Twitter)

After the site was sold to News Corporation in 2005, it launched the MySpace Records label, inviting unknown talent to showcase their work. Nicki Minaj, Lily Allen, Sean Kingston, Arctic Monkeys, Paramore, and Katy Perry are among the artists discovered through the social networking service.

It’s unclear when, or even if, Instagram will roll out its own version of the MySpace function, and how many tunes will be available. The company did not immediately respond to PCMag’s request for comment. You can, of course, already add music to an Instagram Story.

Gen Xers and millennials everywhere were driven to LiveJournal their thoughts in 2019 after MySpace deleted 12 years of audio, photo, and video content uploaded between 2003 and 2015 during a server migration project. The Internet Archive later posted a selection of some 490,000 MP3s collected from the site before they were lost.

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