Guides

How to add music to your Instagram Story

Here’s how to add a soundtrack to your Instagram highlight reel.

Sam Hill

Trying to add music to your Instagram Story? Before TikTok, there wasn’t really an official way to get music into your stories, but now Instagram has a whole built-in system for adding tunes.

First, when you go to post a story, whether you’re pulling a photo from your phone’s library or taking a video through Instagram, just tap the musical note icon in the top right corner of the screen to pull up Instagram’s music center.

Once you’ve entered the music tab, you can browse trending tracks or search for a specific song.

Find your vibe — From here you can browse for music that fits the vibe of your post. This screen has a “For You” section populated with tracks that we assume is a combination of popular songs at the time, songs in videos or Reels you’ve liked or saved, and songs from artists you’ve followed previously. In the “Browse” tab, you can scroll through small collections of songs under labels for genres, moods, and themes if you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for. You can, of course, search for any song you’d like, too.

Once you find and tap the song you’re looking for, you can choose how your music choice will display on your story. Instagram gives you a few display options including captioning lyrics (for most songs) in a couple styles or displaying the album artwork. You can scroll through these options before settling on your favorite.

You can also use sliders at the bottom of the screen to adjust which part of a song you want to feature and exactly how long you want the snippet to be.

When you’ve selected a song, you can pick from a few display options and pick a 15-second snippet to play over your story.

Once you think you’ve got it right, just tap “Done” in the upper right-hand corner to preview your story. You can drag and resize the music feature to fit your story style like any other Instagram sticker. If you want to make changes to any of the above options, just tap on the lyrics or album art to go back to the previous screen.

When you’re ready to release your story to the world, just choose whether you want it to post on your main story, to your close friends list, or send to just a few select users and you’re good to go.

Looking for something obscure? — What if you can’t find the song you’re looking for on Instagram? Occasionally this will happen. Maybe you’re looking for a specific live version of a popular song, a hit from an up-and-coming band that isn’t everywhere yet, or a song you’re listening to right now over the coffee shop speakers. Luckily, a lot of popular music apps like Spotify, Soundcloud, and Shazam have an option to share a song to your Instagram Stories. You won’t get as many options to customize the look of your post, but you can still share your favorite songs.