Photo-sharing app Instagram has followed in the footsteps of Twitter and Snapchat, honing in on curated content with @music, a brand new dedicated music channel.

It’s the first time Instagram have created a platform like this. As the company explained, there’s 300 or so million Instagram users out there, and a LOT of them are into music. In fact, more than a quarter of Instagram’s most popular accounts belong to musicians. So @music will be used to thrust particular artists into a very large spotlight, inserting them into the feeds of users across the world.

It’s clearer than ever that Instagram, alongside Facebook and Twitter, is one of the most important social media tools in any celebrity, brand or artist toolkit, and is often seen as a news source on top of a promotional one. Artists have not only been using Instagram to interact with fans or share those filtered pictures of the horizon outside aeroplane windows, but to drop album news, share snippets of unreleased music and more.

According to Buzzfeed, @Music will be updated once a day between Tuesday and Sunday. Among the curated content, we’ll see featured artist profiles, editorials, 15-second music lessons and a showcase of independent artists throughout the world. Instagram also promises to highlight music photographers, album illustrators and more.

As we can see from Instagram’s first announcement, the first two artists to be showcased will be The Roots’ Questlove, and upcoming Japanese math-rock band Tricot. The Instagram posts themselves will provide a little information, while their dedicated blog page will feature more in-depth editorial, as you can see here.

Instagram have made no secret of their plan to become a one-stop-shop for the music industry and consumers alike. It’ll be interesting to see whether @music grows to become an integral asset for labels, publicists and artists

It’s an interesting move for Instagram, traditionally based on visual content, rather than audio. Instagram’s capacity for promoting music isn’t exactly great – you can only play a few seconds of a song at any one time, and the traditional Instagram comment or caption doesn’t allow for hyperlinked URLs. This means that anyone who wants to actually listen to the music being promoted, will, in Instagram’s current form, have to leave the platform and be redirected to iTunes,  YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp etc. to listen to a full song or to purchase music. Does this mean we’ll see an Instagram streaming service or in-app purchases? Or will they be partnering up with a pre-existing one? Only time will tell.

In any case, it’s great to see that they’re clearly planning to focus on upcoming talent as much as the bigger ones, and it’ll be interested to see how it all pans out. Of course, upcoming artists with funding will likely benefit greatly – such widespread advertising can’t come cheap.