Meta offers royalty-free music library to Instagram Reels advertisers – Music Business Worldwide

After seeing 30% more engagement with Reels on both Instagram and Facebook in the second quarter, parent company Meta is now offering royalty-free music for advertisers to use in Reel ads.

Meta announced the update in a release on Tuesday (October 4).

“Audio is also an important hook to drive Reels engagement. To make it easier for businesses to create Reels ads, we are rolling out free, high-quality songs from our Meta Sound Collection that can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels,” Meta said.

Advertisers can pick out a song from Meta’s library or let the app select a track that best fits an a based on its content. They can also let Meta’s Ads Manager automatically choose the best track for an ad according to its content.

The development comes on the heels of Meta’s latest revenue-sharing deal with major labels including Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group that allows the labels and artists to receive a portion of revenue from the use of licensed music on Facebook creators’ posts.

Meta has yet to disclose whether the revenue-sharing deal is also applicable for Reels.

Meta will launch a pilot run of post-loop ads on Facebook that are skippable after 4-10 seconds and standalone video ads that play after a reel has ended. The original reel will resume and loop again when the ad finishes playing.

Additionally, Meta will be trialling image carousel ads for Reels that are horizontally-scrollable and includes anywhere from 2 to 10 image ads shown at the bottom of Facebook Reels content.

For Instagram Reels, Meta Ads Manager will let users manually apply music by selecting up to five songs. The Ads Manager will use a song from one of the chosen tracks at delivery of the ad. Advertisers can preview five songs from the recommendation algorithm when creating an ad, although it is unable to predict which song is applied to the ad at the time of delivery.

The addition of royalty-free music to ads on Reels, however, is not applicable to existing posts, dynamic creative optimizations, placement asset customizations or posts using Meta Creative Hub. The feature is only available on Carousel Ads on Instagram Reels at the moment.

The feature is just among a few other new tools that Meta has rolled out on Tuesday for businesses that use its platforms.Music Business Worldwide