Music Research Guide: Musical Recordings

Music Online: American Music is a history database that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. The database includes songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers and cowboys. Included in the database are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, anti-war protests and more.

More than 23,000 tracks for listening, with reference materials featuring recordings of music from the earliest times to the present. The world’s great artists are featured, recorded by the foremost record labels. New tracks are added monthly.

Music Online: Contemporary World Music delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent.

Music Online: Jazz Music Library is the largest and most comprehensive collection of streaming jazz available online — with thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.

Music Online: Opera in Video contains five hundred hours of the most important opera performances, captured on video through staged productions, interviews, and documentaries. Selections represent the world’s best performers, conductors, and opera houses and are based on a work’s importance to the operatic canon.

Music Online: Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions.

Naxos provides a streaming video library of classical music performances, opera, ballet, live concerts and documentaries. Watch the world's greatest opera houses, ballet companies, orchestras and artists perform on demand!