We consider some definitions of tangent space to a Radon measure μ on ℝn that have been given in the literature. In particular, we focus our attention on a recent distributional notion of tangent vector field to a measure and we compare it to other definitions coming from ‘geometric measure theory’, based on the idea of blow-up. After showing some classes of examples, we prove an estimate from above for the dimension of the tangent spaces and a rectifiability theorem which also includes the case of measures supported on sets of variable dimension.