How to Share Music on Tumblr

Tumblr is not just for stunning photographs and funny GIFs; in fact, Tumblr also has a thriving music community centered around the "#music" tag with an official blog highlighting notable music-related posts. If there's music you love, or you're a musician yourself, you can use your Tumblr blog to share it with your readers and hopefully introduce it to a broader audience.

Because Tumblr integrates with Spotify, you can share any song on your blog that is already on Spotify simply by typing its title in the search field that appears when you create a new audio post and selecting it from a list of results. The finished post displays the song using the Spotify player, which includes a large view of the album art. When one of your readers clicks the "Play" button, the Spotify Web player opens in a new window; if he isn't logged in to Spotify, he's prompted to do so.

If the music you want to share is already on SoundCloud, you can just link it from there. Click the "External URL" tab when creating a new post and paste the SoundCloud URL for the music in the text field; you can also share a SoundCloud playlist in the same manner. The music will be displayed using the SoundCloud player in exactly the same way as it would show on SoundCloud itself.

If you have the song you want to share in MP3 format you can upload it directly to Tumblr, although the file may not be larger than 10MB in size; to do so, just select the "Upload" tab when creating an audio post. If the file includes album art and title, artist and album information, Tumblr will automatically fill in those details in for you in the post once the file has finished uploading; if it doesn't, you'll need to add the information manually. All the details, including the album art, are visible when the post is viewed through the dashboard. Whether they also appear on the blog post itself, on the other hand, depends on the theme you're using.

If you have the file in MP3 format but it's too big to upload directly to Tumblr, upload it to a separate host or even to the public folder of your cloud storage account. Once you've done that, get the direct link to the file -- it has to end in ".mp3" or it won't work -- then start a new audio post, click the "External URL" tab and paste the link to the file in the text field. If the file includes album art and title, artist and album information, Tumblr will auto-populate those details in the post for you; otherwise, you'll have to add them manually. When you do this, the finished post looks identical to the one you'd get by uploading the file directly to Tumblr.