Find music – search features and tips
Media Match Music offers a variety of dynamic music search features. This is an introduction offering helpful tips for our existing and new music publishing clients coming to this site to find and source music to license for their various commercial projects.
Introduction to ‘Find Music’ search
Media Match Music’s Licensing Store is on this site’s home page. It is not necessary to register in order to preview tracks by conducting a search. Each track that is previewed also has a license option that provides more information on licensing options. In order to submit a request or license a track there is an option to log in and register. There is no obligation to purchase licenses.
Search filters
On the next row you’ll find the “All Publishers” filter and the “Search keywords” entry field. To search by Publisher listing, click the down arrow on the “drop down” menu to browse by Publisher names. When you select a specific publisher you can then search by brand or catalog names from the next filter below.
All publishers will have at least one or more brands (e.g. artist, composer, band) or catalogs. After you select a unique brand or catalog, only the Genres and subgenres (when available) and related Tags will appear in the remaining search filters.
Narrowing down your search
After you’ve narrowed down to a specific publisher and/or catalog, you can “drill down” further by searching for Keyword or any combination of keywords, such as a keyword phrase using 2 or 3 keywords. When you hover over the Search keywords box for a few seconds, a tooltip will appear with some simple search “switch” options like using +, and, -, and more. For complete details please see this article: Search tips to find and play music previews for your projects.
Using the ‘Search keywords’ box
You can also use the Search keywords box before selecting any specific publisher or catalog. In this case you can search “globally” from among all publisher’s available music tracks. For example, if you type in: “+smooth +jazz” (with the plus sign switches) it will search for all instances of “smooth jazz” where both “smooth” and “jazz” appears in the song’s title or description. Currently this search returns 220 unique song/track items.
Global vs local publisher and catalogs/brands search
Please note that a global search normally takes about 4 – 5 seconds longer than doing the same search from within a unique publisher’s store or catalog. Therefore, searching from within a Publisher’s catalog, the results are much faster because the search engine only needs to search a small portion of the whole (global) data base.
Tips for using Search keywords entry vs Tags
Searching by Keywords or keyword phrases
Use Search keywords when searching for known song details or when “guessing” the keywords the publishers are using to describe each track’s unique qualities, features (lyrics, purpose, etc.) or other details which sets it apart from other songs. This is also a good for doing a global search for narrowing down your search, like “cartoony piece” in case you can’t find an exact genre for it, though “Cartoon” is currently an active Genre, so you can try searching both ways.
Searching by Tags
Search by Tags for common category elements. The advantage is that no “guessing” is required as you’ll be able to browse a list of available Tags. The Tags search feature only works after you’ve selected a specific Publisher or Brand/Catalog. Since there’s about 4 tags per average track, it would be difficult to go down a list of thousands of tags (e.g. 9,000 x 4 = 36,000) for doing a global search, but in many cases the most important “tags” are also listed in the track’s descriptions (yes, there is some overlap!), so doing a global “Search keywords” search may give give results in many cases.
Keywords vs Tags search summary and chart
To summarize, please see the reference chart below for a quick overview and summary of the differences between the Search keywords vs the Tags searching mechanisms.
