Search Every Piece of Music on the Web?

November 26th, 2007

Or at least it seems like it, a new site that GigaOM reviewed the other day will allow you to listen to almost any song out there. While the GigaOM writer threw in some obscure terms and artists I chose to search for some obscure musical theater material and I too was quite impressed with the results. Even though the quality of playback varies, some material is just plain hard to track down and this engine did a decidedly good job at it.

The GigaOM reviewer mentioned the possibility that one of the sources searched is YouTube but minus the music, I’d say that’s a good guess since several of my musical-related searches returned live-recorded content. The other tell-tale is the number of "Me singing ..<song title here>.." search results. As with any high-volume search engine where quantity is the central focus quality often becomes a challenge. But we’ll see, I suspect there will be several more quantity-based search engines appearing in the days to come, how will they handle this issue? We’ll have to wait and see.