Welcome to my first lesson on how to find music on the internets. In reality, it’s really not tough to do…if you know how. With the upcoming lessons, I’ll give you tools and the knowledge you need to find pretty much any music you want, as long as someone, somewhere has uploaded it.
This isn’t to say you’ll really be able to find everything because there are still somethings that aren’t on the web, as hard as that is to believe. But that changes every day, and what wasn’t there yesterday may well be there tomorrow.
So lets begin with the basics.
CHAPTER ONE: GOOGLE
Yup. Google.
It seems strange that the worlds most popular search engine is also the most powerful free music search engine as well…but there you have it.
But that doesn’t mean just typing something in will make it pop up immediately. In fact, you are going to have to be patient with this technique. But fear not, your patience will be rewarded.
As an example we’ll take the most popular album post from the last week: “Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive.” Lets punch that exact title into Google and see what we get.
What we get is the Amazon page for the album, his Wiki page, tickets from his upcoming tour dates, his personal web page…etc. But no album downloads. You could scroll through hundreds of pages of search results, but that takes a long time. What to do?
NARROW YOUR SEARCH
You want to narrow your search. The easiest way to start with this is to go to the top left hand side of the Google search page and click on the “more” button on the right hand side of the task bar. When the drop down menu appears click on “blogs.”
See, most music out there is posted on blogs so this is a great start. Our results are a bunch of articles about Frampton, but not quite what we want. So lets narrow our search term to “Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive download.”
Our new search results pop up and we see a couple of articles about the album, news about tours, and then…about seven results down we find what we want.
Boo Yaaaa!!! Better yet, it’s a 320kb copy, which is the highest quality mp3 you can get! We’ll just ignore the fact that they misspelled deluxe.
OTHER TRICKS
So, that whole little exercise took me around 5 minutes. Not bad. But what if “Peter Frampton - Frampton Comes Alive download” didn’t work? Well then you start going through your different search term permutations like:
Peter Frampton alive download
Frampton comes alive download
Frampton comes alive .rar (rar is a compression file…like a zip file. If you don’t have it, download it here.)
Frampton alive DL
If that still doesn’t work. I use Google image search. I know that sounds crazy, but it works a lot of the time. The image search button is up on the same search bar we found the “more” button earlier.
When the images pop up, you’ll see a lot of album cover shots…start there. Click on each image and check out the corresponding site. By slowly going through these sites, you have a 90% chance of finding one hosting said album. Score!
This is also a good way to discover great music sites that have stuff you like, so make sure you bookmark ‘em!
That’s all for today’s lesson, stay tuned for more!
If any of you readers have a good Google related music search tip, feel free to leave it in the comments for extra credit!
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Now that we have seen the best way to use your search engine, lets move on to our next, and shortest chapter.
