Instagram Stories has twice as many daily users as Snapchat's service — and it now has background music

Instagram Stories now has double the number of daily active users as competitor Snapchat, according to Instagram.

The Stories feature, which allows users to share ephemeral photos with their followers, is up to 400 million daily users, Instagram said on Thursday. Snapchat pioneered the photo stories model and reported 191 million daily active users for the first quarter of 2018, according to Snap's most recent quarterly report.

Instagram has been building up its Stories product with new features and functions in an effort to drive engagement with younger social media users. Last week, the Facebook-owned company introduced IGTV, a long-form video feature designed to keep users in the app longer, and announced its broader platform has surpassed one billion monthly active accounts.

The newest update will let users add background music to their Stories.

Source: Instagram

The Soundtrack feature, previously reported by TechCrunch, will roll out first to iOS users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and Sweden. Instagram said a global roll-out would follow "in the future."

Users can snap a photo in the app, tap the new music sticker in the folder of editing add-ons and search for a song to play in the background. Friends who tap into the story will hear the song from the exact point the poster cued up.

Instagram will offer a library of "thousands of songs," the company said, likely bolstered by Facebook's recent licensing deals with music labels.

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