Google Music Search

December 15, 2005 9:45 AM

Google music search... It had to happen sooner or later, right? Drop in a phrase, you get artist, album, and song title matches to choose from. Choose an artist, you get a list of their albums and on the album page you get a tracklisting and links to buy the album online, as well as links to do other artist/album/song-related Google searches.
posted by sarajflemming (52 comments total)

Your search - wrathchild america - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "wrathchild america".
Pfuj.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:48 AM on December 15, 2005

It didn't work for me.
posted by Plutor at 9:49 AM on December 15, 2005

Searching classical is completely crap. Try 'Schoenberg' or 'Appalachian Spring'.

'Pernice Brothers' worked surprisingly well tho.
posted by unSane at 9:52 AM on December 15, 2005

Pretty nice how they have woven in reviews. And they have album lists for even somewhat obscure artists like Toyah. I will certainly use this. Thanks for the link, sarajflemming.
posted by Triplanetary at 9:54 AM on December 15, 2005

This is awesome!

"swingin-est song" turned up "Quarter to Three by Gary "U.S." Bonds. I never knew who that song was by or what it was called. And "If You Wanna Be Happy" is by Kid Creole & the Coconuts. Who knew?
posted by ibmcginty at 9:55 AM on December 15, 2005

It works quite well for industrial music.
posted by cmonkey at 9:55 AM on December 15, 2005

This seems faster and slightly less cluttered than allmusic. If they could expand their database of artists to allmusic's level, I'd probably use it.
posted by Espy Gillespie at 9:55 AM on December 15, 2005

And thanks!
posted by ibmcginty at 9:55 AM on December 15, 2005

I now know that there are (at least) 741 songs named "Wish You Were Here". Luckily Google's good with the DWIM, and returned the right result first. This has potential. It's far from perfect, though, as the first three comments indicate.
posted by Plutor at 9:55 AM on December 15, 2005

I really wish they'd do a related artists thing that actually works unlike the other ones out there.
posted by cmonkey at 9:57 AM on December 15, 2005

God, what a joke. I hope they work out the kinks because every search is yielding nothing. How can anyone find any information on my top 50 albums of 2005 with this thing?
posted by Mach3avelli at 9:58 AM on December 15, 2005

Searching for "the middle east" does successfully turn up Stormtroopers of Death. That's something, I guess.

faster and slightly less cluttered than allmusic.
Well, "faster than allmusic" is damning with faint praise, don't you think?
posted by Wolfdog at 9:58 AM on December 15, 2005

Music...pah...I'm still holding my breath for their calendar. Hear that google? We want calendar.
posted by prettyboyfloyd at 10:01 AM on December 15, 2005

I wish I had a tool similar to this to search the thousands of songs on my PC.
posted by Todd Lokken at 10:08 AM on December 15, 2005

Does it show me where to find torrents?
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 10:09 AM on December 15, 2005

Plutor - you weren't really trying to find that, were you?

I agree that this has some potential, and of course that it will need some fleshing out to be truly great.
posted by soyjoy at 10:12 AM on December 15, 2005

I searched for some obscure band (with a relatively generic name, even) and it came back right on the first result.

Am I right to think that whether or not a Google Music Search can find the band your looking for depends on that band's internet presence?
posted by carsonb at 10:13 AM on December 15, 2005

Seems pretty incomplete. I still prefer discogs.com.
posted by hyperizer at 10:13 AM on December 15, 2005

It's pretty good, I imagine since it's fairly new there are some bugs to work out.

If they can incorporate a lyric search, that'd be a little better. For now I think I'll stick with allmusic, but it'll be a close second
posted by roadmonkey at 10:15 AM on December 15, 2005

MusicPlasma is good too...
posted by Dormant Gorilla at 10:17 AM on December 15, 2005

God, what a joke. I hope they work out the kinks because every search is yielding nothing.

I didn't have any trouble finding them. I kid.
posted by ktrey at 10:21 AM on December 15, 2005

I like MusicPlasma, If I'm bored with some of the stuff I'm listening to and want to find new music that might be good.
posted by roadmonkey at 10:23 AM on December 15, 2005

Mach3avelli: You're my kind of music geek. Start an MP3 blog, please.
posted by fungible at 10:23 AM on December 15, 2005

Interesting that it's not labeled Beta, like most Google gubbins. Well, faintly interesting.

I'll stick with Discogs.com for relatively obscure stuff, but this is pretty snappy if it's heard of the band in question.
posted by jack_mo at 10:26 AM on December 15, 2005

soyjoy: "Plutor - you weren't really trying to find that, were you?"

Well, no, not really. Your search does come up with the right result, but then again so does a normal Google search with my original search term. If standard Google can find it, why can't Music Man Google?
posted by Plutor at 10:29 AM on December 15, 2005

Plutor:

I think the idea is to search for albums or artists, not lyrics, which is unfortunate and not much harder to implement.
posted by roadmonkey at 10:34 AM on December 15, 2005

Only works for shitty music.
posted by HTuttle at 10:39 AM on December 15, 2005

Yeah, I like discogs.com, too. For one thing, there is a boatload more information for artists and albums. Plus you get the label on which a given release was...released. And you can add comments and the like.

It's a start though, this Google music search.
posted by sarajflemming at 10:41 AM on December 15, 2005

Mach3avelli, nice list. I'm shocked, however, that you don't have The Drift's Travels in Constants release on there. It kicks that EitS CD's ass, easy.
posted by dobbs at 10:48 AM on December 15, 2005

I typed in a few obscure lyrics/titles, and zilch. Where are they going with this? To offer their services to MP3 vendors? Amazon and B&N problably don't need them, so, what's the profit model?
posted by ParisParamus at 10:50 AM on December 15, 2005

Where are they going with this?

Google's profit model across all of their search services is to accompany search results with advertising.
posted by mendel at 10:58 AM on December 15, 2005

Hey, if it works better and faster than AllMusic I'm all over it.
posted by wfrgms at 11:00 AM on December 15, 2005

The musicplasma map is great, and searching discogs.com delivered way more results than Google Music but made me feel like a total music geek.
posted by kozad at 11:12 AM on December 15, 2005

Meets my standard of sufficiently obscure band, but I suppose 'obscurity' here should be defined as a function of locale, and not necessarily of the net. (Meaning, I realise that just because local music stores don't carry these guys' CD's doesn't mean the band is necessarily obscure on the net)

That said, rather funky to see that they've tied-in albums and lyrics as well; if only they can somehow put some samples for each song, for instance, it'd be great!
posted by the cydonian at 11:13 AM on December 15, 2005

What I'd like to see is a way to input a series of notes or chords and get a list of exact matches (if any) and close matches.

For example, enter in a bass line of "e e f# g f# g f# e", and the results would look something like:

Roundabout - Yes
Love Machine - The Miracles

(Approximate matches:
Maneater - Hall & Oates)

(Very approximate matches:
Dies Irae
Charlie Brown theme - Vince Guaraldi)

There are some search engines similar to this: classical (Java), where you click piano keys to describe your tune; and an ASCII description language for music, with a search engine.

Ideally, Google Music 2 would be broad and comprehensive, with the following bits of smarts:
- search on chord progressions, modes, polyphony, key and time signatures, meter changes
- recognize and associate patterns in different-sounding tunes (e.g. guitar riff in Sheryl Crow's "If It Makes You Happy" = slower version of riff from Rolling Stones' "Happy"; or Sting's "Russians" borrowing from Holst's "Suite in Eb for Military Band")
posted by kurumi at 11:13 AM on December 15, 2005

I like last.fm. Has been discussed before in the blue.

What does it do? Using a plugin for either itunes, winamp, windows media, etc. it sends mp3 meta tags to a database as you listen to your music. Meanwhile, an algorithm calculates your closest neighbors based on your listening history.

Think musicplasma + amazon + friendster. All you have to do is get over the fact that they are collecting a ton of information about you. In fact, why hasn't google purchased them yet?
posted by |n$eCur3 at 11:13 AM on December 15, 2005

Your search - "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" - did not match any documents. C'mon, everybody knows what song that's from.
posted by TimeFactor at 11:16 AM on December 15, 2005

Hey, if it works better and faster than AllMusic I'm all over it.

I agree. I was delighted to find that it even listed Bogdan Raczynski.
posted by vkxmai at 11:24 AM on December 15, 2005

Google stands to make a good chunk of referral change with this.
posted by shoepal at 11:32 AM on December 15, 2005

Google House Key Search: still mired in R&D
posted by Marnie at 11:34 AM on December 15, 2005

lol @ fungible
posted by stratastar at 11:52 AM on December 15, 2005

Seems OK to me, given the way Google tends to launch late alphas as early betas. The extra search links it gives you with album listings are a joke, though -- if you look up a listing for Asia, for example, then click "Artist websites," all you're getting is a Google search for "Asia." Same with news and image searches -- WEAK. The redesigned All Music Guide is a beast and a half, but it still beats this.
posted by aaronetc at 11:56 AM on December 15, 2005

Google's music search does link to a lyrics search, which is interesting consider the flap over that recently.
posted by adamrice at 1:08 PM on December 15, 2005

This would be cool if it actually turned up music files.

Instead, I search for "Pink Floyd," and get a bunch of websites related to Pink Floyd. Gee, this is really useful. I can't use normal Google search and get roughly the same thing.

/snark
posted by Afroblanco at 2:03 PM on December 15, 2005

Mach3avelli: Ack. Every album you listed that I recognized I liked. Now I'm going to have to go read up on and find simples of bands from that list. (Thanks, I was hungry for new music)
posted by kryptondog at 2:42 PM on December 15, 2005

Aldo Nova! Of course!
*slaps forehead*
posted by krix at 3:42 PM on December 15, 2005

Todd Loken: There is a plug-in for Google Desktop that will index and search music files on your PC. Actually, there's more than one plug-in.
posted by davem at 4:36 PM on December 15, 2005

God, what a joke.

This from the guy who uses the term "electro-indie-pop" and "neopost-rock" without a hint of sarcasm.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:49 PM on December 15, 2005

It turned up my semi-obscure band, but it doesn't have their latest album.

So, half marks.
posted by SoftRain at 7:15 PM on December 15, 2005

Your search - "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" - did not match any documents.

Duh, that's 'cause you misspelled it. Everybody knows it's supposed to be "Scuse me..."
posted by soyjoy at 8:14 PM on December 15, 2005

Davem....thanks!
posted by Todd Lokken at 12:15 PM on December 16, 2005

it does work very well for industrial music....do you think for some reason google techs really like vnv nation and nine inch nails...
posted by stilgar at 6:27 PM on December 16, 2005