How To Add Music To Instagram

Sometimes being up to date with every little detail on social media can get overwhelming. Different shaped buttons left, right and centre, swipe this way to do this and that way to do that – it can all feel like a bit much, and Instagram is no exception. 

Perfecting your posts is essential to helping your wedding business grow and develop and makes it easier for you to forge your relationship with booked couples and potential ones, too. 

An important feature that you might have overlooked is the use of music – a feature that Instagram lets you use to overlay music on stories and reels. Using this adds more of a contemporary flair to your posts and could even help you to reach couples you might not have attracted before. 

If this sounds good to you, we’ve made a handy set of instructions to help you add music to your Instagram posts.

If your Instagram is a business account there are a couple of things you should remember before you add music to your content. Due to copyright laws, businesses accounts that use popular music in their content can be removed under certain conditions. This is due to Facebook’s rules against using other peoples’ property to profit off of branded content. 

There are a few ways to ensure this doesn’t happen. The first is to make sure you only use music for short videos or stories as to not violate the policies – so long as you don’t use too much at once it is considered fair use (Instagram allows a maximum of 15 seconds of music per single story post, so you shouldn’t need to worry for these, only reels).

Charlotte’s Top Tip

If you’d rather not use popular music and just want any tune in the background, Instagram has a library of royalty free music so that you don’t have to worry about your content once it’s posted.

1. Tap the “+” icon on the homepage to create a new post
2. There will be a small bar at the button with “POST” selected – tap “STORY” next to it or swipe this to the left so it changes to “STORY”
3. Once the story window is open, upload your content to post using the picture icon in the bottom left (or use the camera to take a video or picture)
4. Tap the smiley face sticker at the top of the screen, select “MUSIC” from the list and search for the song you want
5. Choose the section of the song you want to play, decide the length and where you want the song to be displayed on your screen
6. If everything is completed, tap “Send To” and then press “Share” and it will be added to your story

1. Tap the “+” icon on the homepage to create a new post
2. There will be a small bar at the button with “POST” selected – tap “REELS” next to it or swipe this to the left so it changes to “REELS”
3. Upload or record your desired reels content using the icon in the bottom left or the film icon in the bottom middle
4. Tap the musical note icon labelled “Audio” on the left to add your music
5. Select “Preview” when finished to preview your reel and add any finishing touches you might want
6. Select “Next” and provide your post with a caption, cover image and hashtags, then tap “Share” to post your reel

Adding music to your IGTV videos is not quite as easy as adding it to your story or reels. IGTVs need to be created in an external video editor such as iMovie, OpenShot or PremierPro. So if you plan on adding music to your IGTV videos, you will need to add the music in the editing process, then import it into IGTV by using the picture icon in the bottom left. 

You can add music or anything else you want to include with pretty much any video editor. There are some free options, such as the basic version of iMovie, but you might also want to consider paid options to be able to get more creative with it. 

IGTV videos have to be at least one minute long, so remember copyright laws here as accounts that constantly post full-length copyrighted songs are prone to being terminated.

Hopefully this helps you to create your own stylish reels and stories with music and we hope it helps you increase your audience and engagement through your all-important Instagram page.