Streaming Music
The MSU Libraries subscribes to several streaming music resources (described below). A live Internet connection is required to use these services. Downloading from these services is not possible, but listeners can register with each site to create individual playlists.
- African American Song
- American Song
- Classical Music Library
- Smithsonian Global Sound
African American Song is the first online resource to document the history of African American music in an online music listening service. The collection contains a diverse range of genres such as jazz, blues, gospel, ragtime, folk songs, and narratives, among others.
This release features some 16,000 tracks of great historical recordings from Document Records. This great collection features recordings from the first half of the 20th century and includes iconic artists such as The Fisk Jubilee Singers, Memphis Minnie, Blind Willie McTell and Huddie Ledbetter. It provides a rich source of Blues and early Jazz recordings as well as a lot of sacred music.
American Song is a history database that will contain 50,000 tracks that allows people to hear and feel the music from America's past. The database will include 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. This release includes 728 albums -- more than 12,103 tracks.
Classical Music Library includes recordings of music written from the earliest times (eg Gregorian Chant) to the present, including many contemporary composers. Repertoire ranges from vocal and choral music, to chamber, orchestral, solo instrumental, and opera.
Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries, produced in partnership with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is a virtual encyclopedia of the world's musical and aural traditions. The collection provides educators, students, and interested listeners with an unprecedented variety of online resources that support the creation, continuity, and preservation of diverse musical forms.
It includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. It also includes music recorded around the African continent by Dr. Hugh Tracey for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University as well as material collected by recordists on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.