Songza. "The music search engine & internet jukebox. Listen. Now."
The jukebox in the sky has long been at the top of many of our Web wishlists. Simple, elegant, Songza scrapes YouTube for songs. Quality varies. You search, you listen. Rate what you find to help bring good recordings to the top. Discography and Buy links go to Google. Make a playlist. Share, by email; link to the song, play the video on YouTube.
Or embed it:
This is a group sifting of a title dump. It's a great browsing tool. If you want to hear the tune you fell in love to in high school, you might have to play a lot of raw titles to find the one that's not a cover or a later, live performance.
It would be nice to be able to comment on the titles to add that sort of information, but I suspect that will come later. (Songza just launched Thursday.) Not everything is here, or easily findable. Perhaps a way to request titles could build a demand, eventually landing tunes on YouTube, and then here.
Many thanks to Aza Raskin and Scott Robbin of Humanized in Chicago for stringing it all together.
Related:Seeqpod is a playable search site that harvests links to songs on the Web and then tries to play them. I couldn't find the 1968 Super Session (Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, Steve Stills) version of Season of the Witch on Songza; Seeqpod gave me a link, but it didn't play. But Seeqpod did have an Issa Bagayogo tune (Ciew Mawele) Songza didn't have.
Seeqpod shows what people are searching for and, while they tend to be newer songs, I just saw a search for Rat-Pack bandleader Nelson Riddle whiz by.
Both are useful -- it depends on what you're looking for.
Sheila Lennon
is features & interactive producer of projo.com, the Web site of The Providence (R.I.) Journal
Rhode Island
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