Reference

About Music Online

Search Alexander Street Press’ reference material, audio and music.

Use at a library or enter your library card & PIN.

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Key features

Music Online delivers audio recordings, full-text reference materials, liner notes, biographies, and images. The resources you search include:

American Song
Hear the music from America’s past as well as recent additions. Genres from country to Motown music are covered within a growing collection of over 175,000 tracks.
Classical Music Library
The world’s largest multi-label database of classical music recordings. A free track to download is offered each week.
Contemporary World Music
Delivers the sounds of all regions from Bollywood to Balkanic jazz to Arabic swing.
Jazz Music Library
A comprehensive collection of jazz. Thousands of jazz artists, albums and genres.
Smithsonian Global Sound
A virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions — more than 40,000 individual tracks of music, spoken word, and natural and human-made sounds. A free track to download is offered each fortnight.

Other Features

  • Build playlists using content from anywhere in Music Online — and from anywhere on the web. You can annotate your playlist, keep it at a permanent URL for private use, or share it.
  • Playlists can include multiple recordings of a single work, the score, a video performance, web pages, and a biography and photograph of the composer.
  • Built-in playlists match leading music textbooks and ready-made playlists for university-level courses.
  • Suitable for early high school students and up. Includes some children’s music.
  • Over 300 albums across all genres from, or about, New Zealand.

More information

Every object in the collection is indexed for subjects, historical events, genres, people, cultural groups, places and time periods. As a result, users can make highly targeted queries. You can also create your own playlists with this help guide: