Instagram admits it has been recommending too much Creed

Instagram has a song it really wants you to hear. It doesn't seem to matter whether you're posting a picture of your cat, your dinner or a particularly nice sunset: The social media platform has repeatedly been suggesting Creed 's 1999 rock anthem "Higher."

And it turns out users weren't imagining it.

Instagram, the Bay Area social media company owned by Meta, acknowledged Thursday that a problem with its music recommendations was causing the song to appear for more people than intended. The company said its engineering team was investigating and working on a fix, though it has not explained what went wrong.

The recurring recommendations had become a running joke online , with users wondering why a song that peaked during the late-1990s rock boom seemed to be the soundtrack Instagram had selected for just about everything.

"I can't prove it but pretty sure Creed is paying META to suggest their song 'Higher' on all Instagram Stories," one user wrote on X in August.

"Higher," released on Creed's second album, "Human Clay," became one of the defining radio-rock songs around the turn of the millennium.

Others described getting the same suggestion when posting photos of everyday life - including a Caesar salad - and began comparing notes about the apparent algorithmic obsession.

Instagram's explanation offered little detail about the underlying technical problem.

A spokesperson for the company told CNN that it had looked into the issue and found the song was being recommended to more people than intended.

Instagram's music suggestions can draw on signals such as songs users have selected before and visual information from the photos or videos they are preparing to share. The company has not said which, if any, of those factors contributed to the Creed problem.

The episode has also drawn attention to another song appearing in some users' recommendations: Soulja Boy's 2008 hit "Turn My Swag On." But Instagram told CNN that those suggestions were not the result of a bug, saying the track was genuinely popular on the platform.