Instagram says a glitch explains why users have been repeatedly urged to add Creed’s “Higher” to their posts, following speculation on X that the band was paying for preferential placement.
A spokesperson for the platform said the 1999 rock anthem was being recommended to “more people than intended,” CNN reported Thursday. The company is still investigating, and its engineers are working on a fix, the spokesperson said.
Posts on X in August and September questioned whether Creed had paid Meta, Instagram’s parent company, for placement. Another user joked that Instagram tried to attach the song to a photo of a Caesar salad.
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Pamela Ross, a communications specialist, told CNN the app suggested the track every time she posted, whether the subject was a dinner plate or her cat. She said she neither follows nor listens to the band.
Instagram’s music suggestions are supposed to work like its other recommendations, weighing signals such as songs a user has chosen before and visual information in the photo or video, CNN reported. The spokesperson’s first response to questions about the trend was a quip that the song is recommended to them, too.
The company drew a distinction with another track users flagged, Soulja Boy’s “Turn My Swag On.” Its frequency is not a bug, the spokesperson said, but reflects genuine popularity on the platform.
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