“I often go to Spotify to check the song I listened to on Instagram (IG) reels. There have been times when I have used ‘Shazam’ (application) to search that music and those trending tunes are just stuck in my head for days,” says 25-year-old Sneha Dutta, who finds it exciting to be exposed to the same songs a large number of people are listening to and vice versa.

Similar to Dutta’s experience, a number of song-covers and indie artists have made their way to Mumbai-based music enthusiast Sreehari Menon’s coveted playlist; thanks to IG reels. While TikTok initially proved to be a stimulant in popularising music through its audio-visual short-format content, after the ban on the platform in India, IG reels entered the content scene to fill the vacuum and soon enough music used on IG reels by creators started dominating trends.