I'm listening to an old episode of "All Songs Considered" right now. It's a review of music from 2000-2010, where they talk about the songs, albums, and trends that defined the decade. In it they talk a lot about how digitization and the internet have made music so much easier to access, from subscription music services that give access to practically any song at any time for dollars a month to a computer program that you can type any sentence into and it will find samples of the words from songs and play them back to you (Here it is, but in my opinion it needs some work).

Anyway, this got me thinking about how easy it is to find songs now. It used to be that if you heard a new song for the first time on the radio but missed its introduction, you just had to wait until you heard it again if you ever wanted to know who it was by. Or maybe you heard a song and knew it was a remake, but you might never find out who the original was by.

Well now you can just get on your phone, google a couple of lyrics, and out comes the result. For instance, Beth played a song I really liked a few months ago that was from an unlabeled mix CD and she didn't even know who the artist was. So I got to work and typed in the only words I could remember: "It's far too early in the morning." If you think about it, that isn't the most specific search term, but first on the list was "The Kooks - Tick of Time Lyrics" and next was an actual music video for the song.

Pretty good, but what if you don't really even know the exact lyrics. Say the song came on the radio as you were waking up or you just weren't really paying attention until you realized later that a song was still in your head. Well I was thinking back to an episode of Married... With Children (Oldies but Young 'Uns - 1991) where Al has a song stuck in his head and spends the first 29 minutes of the episode trying to track it down based on the lyric "hmmmmm hmmmmm him." In the last minute, he serendipitously finds the song and buys the album, only to have someone accidentally smash the record after he gets it home. These days, that episode couldn't happen, because if it did, it would go like this:

0:00:00.00 episode starts, Al hears 5 seconds of song
0:00:12.00 Al has his cell phone out and types "hmm hmm him" into Google
0:00:12.08 Google has returned about 62,800 results
0:00:13.08 Al clicks on the first
0:00:15.08 Al reaches the Wikipedia page "Anna (Go to Him)"
0:00:25.08 Al searches for: Amazon "Anna (Go to Him)" arthur alexander
0:00:27.08 Al uses "1-Click Ordering" to buy the CD
0:00:27.28 Al grins smugly
0:00:30.00 Credits

Anyway, I love that its now so easy to find a good song based on just a snippet or even a little echo thats rattling around in your brain. And after listening to this and some other NPR shows (like this, or this), I've got quite a few songs to search for.