Guides: Music: Popular Music & Jazz

Encyclopedias

Oxford Music Online
Covers all genres of popular music 1900-present, including jazz, country, folk, rap, reggae, techno, musicals, and world music, as well as popular music genres, trends, styles, record labels, venues, and music festivals. Provides key dates, biographies, and further reading for artists covered.

The Virgin encyclopedia of popular music
Call Number: 781.63 vir
Covers 20th-century popular music, including rock, MOR, rap and R&B, as well as soul, country and folk.

Key Periodicals

Music Industry Data This link opens in a new window
Dynamic database enabling searches of international charting albums and singles of popular music under exclusive academic license from Billboard, the Official Charts Company. Delivers over sixty years of popular music data to scholars, students, and researchers in diverse music and social science disciplines and interdisciplinary study. Additional features provide streaming audio links to copyright-cleared sound samples for most cited tracks and albums, and links to full-text articles in leading popular music journals and Web sites, including Popular Music, Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, and Rock's Backpages. Sophisticated tools allow users to interpret, graph, analyse, compare, and contrast musical trends and interactions, and to extract and compare charting data for sound recording sales.
Music Periodicals Database This link opens in a new window
Indexing and abstracts for several hundred international music periodicals from over 20 countries, plus full text for more than 220 of the indexed journals.
Coverage: 1874 - current
Rock's Backpages This link opens in a new window
Full-text and expanding archive of selective interviews, feature articles, reviews, and more on rock and a wide range of popular music (including blues and soul) from the 1950s onward in the music and mainstream press. Updates appear weekly. Click on "enter library here" to search the database. The home page includes links to highlights, audio and video interviews, blogs, and many other features beyond the "ultimate archive of music journalism."

Websites

Billboard.com
Daily music news, weekly charts with music samples, this day in music, new releases, and more. Also has Review Finder, with tens of thousands of original album reviews from 1970. Also has many audio clips.

Popular Music Online

American Song (Alexander Street Press)
Large streaming audio collection of songs and vocal music from the United States, covering a diverse range of Americans, both past and present. Addresses a variety of topics and cultures, and covers a wide range of styles and genres, particularly from popular, folk, and ethnic music. Now includes African American Song. Updated regularly.
Contemporary World Music (Alexander Street Press)
"Contains the sounds of all regions from every continent" by including a blend of contemporary and traditional world music recordings from many labels, with focus on genres such as fusion and world beat. Complements Smithsonian Global Sound.
Jazz Music Library (Alexander Street Press)
Large collection of streamed jazz recordings, covering major and secondary artists, ensembles, labels, and genres, ranging from historical recordings to musicians performing and recording today. Updated regularly.
Live Music Archive (Internet Archive)
A community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. Preserves and archives as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. "All music is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly non-commercial, both for access here and for any further distribution."
Free Music Archive
An interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads.
Creative Commons Directory
Listing of organisations and projects powered by Creative Commons licenses.
The Free Sound Project
A huge database of free sound samples.
ccMixter
A community music remixing site featuring remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons licenses.
more...less...
You are free to download and sample from music on this site and share the results with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Some songs might have certain restrictions, depending on their specific licenses. Each submission is marked clearly with the license that applies to it.

Song Lyrics

See the Musical Theatre tab for lyrics to songs by Broadway composers.

Lyrics.com
Commercial site, but a good source for the lyrics of popular songs.

Research Guides

Blues, Funk, Rhythm and Blues, Soul, Hip Hop, and Rap: A Research and Information Guide by Eddie S. Meadows
Call Number: Ebook

Cambridge Companions Complete Collection This link opens in a new window
The Cambridge Companions Music Collection includes:

The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock
The Cambridge Companion to Jazz
The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop
The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music
The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music
The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music
The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles

The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music
Call Number: 781.64 sag
This handbook is divided into 9 sections: Theory and Method; The Business of Popular Music; Popular Music History; The Global and the Local; The Star System; Body and Identity; Media Technology; and Digital Economies.
Popular Music
Call Number: 781.64 pop
v. 1. History and theoretical traditions
v. 2. Technology and copyright
v. 3. Representation and consumption
v. 4. Cultures and subcultures of popular music