WhatsApp's new new music status updates take me back to my MySpace and MSN Messenger days

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WhatsApp will let you pick songs from Instagram's music catalog
Audio length will depend on the kind of status you're sharing
Tracks will link to your Instagram profile, if you have one

WhatsApp and other Meta services are quite good at taking inspiration from their rivals, so for example Instagram launched its CapCut rival Edits on the same day that the US was expected to ban CapCut as part of the wider TikTok ban. But its latest addition isn't from a current rival, and while it's partly inspired by a feature Instagram has, it's also a real blast from the past. The emo past.

If you're very online and a certain age, you'll remember when MySpace used to let you display specific songs on your profile, or when we used "What I'm Listening To" in our MSN Messenger statuses to show how cool/tortured/whatever we were.

Soon, you'll be able to share songs with your WhatsApp status updates.

This is glorious news if, like me, you're a member of the passive-aggressive community. Instead of saying how you feel, you can get music to do it for you.

The new feature isn't official yet, but it's been in testing for a few months and is appearing for some users of the latest beta version of the app. As WABetaInfo reports, it gives you the ability to share music tracks as status updates.

How WhatsApp's musical status updates work

The new music icon looks like a note and appears just to the left of the crop, sticker, text and markup icons. Tapping it opens up the WhatsApp music catalog, which is the same one you can access in Instagram. It's good, extensive and updated regularly: my band added music to the various streamers last week, and the songs are in Instagram's catalog already.

The length of your musical selection will depend on the kind of status update you're doing. For video, the music will last as long as the clip does; for photo statuses, you're limited to 15 seconds.

As with Instagram, you'll be able to move the selector to pick the specific (and, perhaps, very pointed) part of the song you want others to hear, and tapping on the track will ask you if you want to see the other person's Instagram profile.

As yet we don't know when the new feature will come to the main app, but given that it's appearing for some beta users it's likely to arrive within the next few weeks.

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Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.