iWorld
Facebook and Instagram roll out music products in India
MUMBAI: Facebook announced new ways for people in India to express themselves through music on Facebook and Instagram, with music stickers on Stories and other creative tools such as Lyrics on Instagram, Lip Sync Live, and the ability to add songs to their Facebook Profiles.
With the roll-out of music products today, people across India can add the latest tracks such as Bekhayali – Kabir Singh, Ve Maahi – Kesari, to super hits like Dil Diyan Gallan from Tiger Zinda Hai, and regional hits like Lahore by Guru Randhawa, Zingaat from Sairat as well as old classics like Bas Ek Sanam Chaahiye from Aashiqui, to their Facebook and Instagram Stories.
“Facebook and music share something special — they both bring people together and enable personal expression. And that’s why music is important for us. We want to make it possible for the Facebook and Instagram communities to express themselves and connect around music on our platforms. With India’s strong music ecosystem, we're thrilled to open up the ability for people in the country to include music in the moments they share on our platforms. We've partnered with the Indian music community to enable these new products, and we look forward to seeing all the ways people in India use them to express themselves in fun and engaging way, ” Facebook India director and head of partnerships Manish Chopra commented on the launch.
Earlier this year, Facebook India announced partnerships with top music labels T-Series Music, Zee Music Company and Yash Raj Films, licensing their music for use in social experiences on Facebook and Instagram.
“We continue to see fast adoption of Stories across our family of apps. Today, with the launch of music stickers on Stories, we are excited about giving new ways for people to express and connect with their friends, ” Facebook head of video and music products Paresh Rajawat said.
Product details:
Music on Facebook and Instagram Stories
Starting today, people will be able to add a song to their photos and videos on their Stories. Simply open the camera on Facebook or Instagram or select a photo or video from your gallery, touch the sticker icon and add the Music sticker. After choosing a song, you will be able to select which part of it you would like to highlight on your story, and add the artist's name and track title. Knowing that Hindi film music is integral to music in India, people will be able search for music by Actor and Actress names, in addition to search by Film Name, Singer Name as well as a Song name. People can also search for songs by language.
Lyrics on Instagram: Additionally, if the song has lyrics available, they will automatically pop up. Tap through the icons to change the animation and text style, and move the lyrics around, rotate or resize it like you would a normal sticker.
Lip Sync Live on Facebook: will allow you to perform and dub songs live on Facebook. Friends can check your performance in real time and follow the lyrics of the songs while you have fun together.
To create one, just select the "Lip Sync Live" option when starting a Live on Facebook – choose a song, add a description and customize the video with filters or a background. During broadcasts, friends will be able see the name of the artist and song featured on the video and be able to directly tap to follow the singer or band on Facebook.
Music on Facebook Profile: will allow people to add tracks to a new music section on your Facebook Profile. In addition, you can pin songs at the top of your Profile, so your friends learn more about you. Songs fixed to your Profile will visually show the artist and the track. When your friends play a song on your Profile, they will be able to hear a small clip or choose to listen to the complete track through streaming platforms. They can add the same song to their Profiles or click to visit the singer or band's Page.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
