HACKER Q&A
📣 bedobi

Anyone from Meta?


Since it's so hard to get bug reports looked at figured I might try here though I realize it's grasping at straws

It seems like a not uncommon bug (~30 million hits on google) is for your insta account to get into a state where it no longer plays music added to stories, instead displaying an error "This song is currently unavailable" (even though it plays for literally everyone else and it used to play for you just fine)

STEPS Using the instagram app, open a story that has music added (ie not music from the recording itself) (could be your story or someone elses)

EXPECTED Music plays

ACTUAL "This song is currently unavailable" (even for stories with music you know for a fact was playing fine for you before, and you know for a fact the music is playing for literally everyone else)

MISC My hypothesis is that this happens because insta has somehow decided the account is in a region where the rights to most music isn't available

When you account gets into this state, basically all stories with music added will generate this error

You can still add music to a story when creating it, but you're only given a small library of lame international public domain (or whatever) songs

What's weird is you can still search for the song you want, find it under audio and create your story that way - once posted it will play for everyone except you (because you'll still be getting the "This song is currently unavailable" error when viewing it)

What's also weird is that if you open the same stories (yours of those of others) in insta in a browser on a laptop, the music does play

And the same songs will also play fine when added to Reels

Last but not least I can't explain why insta/fb/meta would get the region wrong - at least me I live in the US and I'm not using VPN or anything like that, just the regular Tmobile 5g and my home wifi in FL, my insta and fb account are associated with my US phone no, US credit cards etc etc

I've filed two support requests for my account (@eightiestokyo) but as mentioned I'm far from the only one affected by this, if anyone has any light at all to shed on it that would be amazing


  👤 KomoD Accepted Answer ✓
Have you checked your account settings and see if it's set to something else there...?