Phil Bradley's weblog

Music search engines

I few days ago I mentioned Songza, which I was, and am very taken with. However, there is a bunch of other similar engines out there, so I thought I'd take a quick look. I did several searches for different artists, unusual tracks and so on. All very unscientific, but if you want more than that, well - feel free to experiment yourself and post the results! :)

Streampad was pants. Couldn't find anything that I was interested in.
Songerize was little better. You need to know track name and artist name to search. If you just put in an artists name it finds what it finds and just plays it without reference back to you. Oh, and the favicon was almost exactly the same as Songza.
Streamzy wasn't at all bad. Found half a dozen Wakeman tunes, located 'Mouldy Old Dough' (which Songza couldn't find), but failed when it came to Michael Nyman. Didn't really like the interface a lot though.
Deezer had a sophisticated interface, slick and attractive, allowing you to save, share playlists and so on. Unfortunately it didn't have any of the artists or tracks I was interested in.
Pandora is still out there of course, but since I'm not in the US I can't use it.
Musicovery is an interesting variant in that you define the type of music you want to listen to - vocal pop, blues, soundtrack etc, then the mood - dark, calm, positive and so on, and it produces examples for you to listen to.
Dizzler had a nice interface, but a limited number of songs; at least of the stuff that I was interested in!

Songza: The music search engine & internet jukebox.

I've played around with a lot of different music sites, and they've always left me slightly dissatisfied - they don't have the (odd, very odd) tunes that I like, or I have to listen to their selection based on a few of mine, or the interface is poor. Finally however (thanks to lo-fi librarian) I've discovered Songza: The music search engine & internet jukebox. Just look for the tunes that interest you, and it pulls them from a wide range of resources and plays them. Just those. The full version. And you can save them into a play list if you register (free). The only disadvantage is that you can't download them, although there's a link to buy them, or watch videos if they're available.

As you'd expect, there's the social element, in that you can subscribe to an RSS feed, or share songs with friends. Songza will also create a webpage that you can share with people (though I don't really like the orange/brown colour scheme). You can take a look at mine if you so desire, though I warn you, it's a very ... strange collection!

Audiobaba Music Search

Audiobaba Music Search is a next generation music search engine that allows you to find songs by acoustic similarity. Until now, there was no easy to way to browse for new music. Audiobaba lets you tell it what kind of music you like and returns results that sound like it but are in fact different. This isn't a new search engine - it's been around for a good few months now and has been on my list to visit.

It works well - I tried it with a couple of unusual songs and it not only found them, but came up with good suggestions for other music in a similar vein. Worth taking a look at.