Partitioning external hard drive

Your TM backup should be to a dedicated drive, i.e. not shared in any way.

You can partition an external drive but keep in mind, drives fail; not partitions. You lose one multipurpose drive and you lose everything.

My personal position is multiple single purpose external drives. Eggs not all in one basket sort of thing. I like spreading the risks around; not concentrating them in one place.

steveod1 wrote:

My questions: Will I have to partition this new drive to accommodate the music files and the Time Machine backups? And will Disc Utility do this all for me?

I would second ku4hx's suggestion to use separate drives for your goal. However, to directly answer your question, you can partition the new drive to work.

Since macOS High Sierra, Apple has provided APFS, which has pretty much superseded HFS+. With APFS, what were called partitions are now called containers. Inside of these you can have one of more volumes. It's important to note that Time Machine uses a "dedicated" volume type ... so you don't want to use that same volume for anything other than for TM.

Now you have a couple of options:

1. You can create a single container, with multiple volumes. One for your music files and the other for TM. However, I do not recommend going this route.
2. You can create two containers. Dedicate one for your music and the other for TM. This is the route I would go if I was limited to just having a single drive.