Going for a song | 12 October 2007

Twenty years ago when I worked at Our Price Records the thing we shop assistants dreaded most were customers who would march up to the counter and announce that they’d heard this song on the radio by [insert artist’s name] before launching into a toe-curling rendition which we were expected to identify.

Today’s Virgin Megastore employees are presumably spared such agonising encounters thanks to Web 2.0, which has spawned countless resources for tracking down a snippet of music that has tickled your fancy. My favourite is foxytunes.com which allows you to search for an artist and brings together, on a single page, relevant elements from all corners of the web: videos from YouTube, Google search results, similar artists from last.fm, photos from flickr, albums available on Amazon, lyrics from lyric sites and blogs from The Hype Machine. It’s the wonderful world of Web. 2.0.