Here's another great listening (and watching) resource for music teachers. For those that are trying to find new ways to add critical listening experiences to our classrooms there are a number of great sites to go to to listen to free music. Spotify, Grooveshark, and many others are the biggies, but those that want a video option as well may want to check out a new site that marries easy searching for tracks with YouTube videos of the performances! Read on to find out more.
Unlike the other music streaming sites Recordlective seems to have amassed a large library of tracks linked directly to YouTube videos. Type in the name of your favorite artist, Louis Armstrong for example, and Recordlective returns a list of all of Armstrongs albums. Select an album and you are taken to a page with a list of the tracks on that album and the video for that track begins to play automatically. There is no way for me to be sure on this, but the vetting process for linking a track to a video must be done by a real human being somewhere. Every song I clicked on was a very high quality audio recording, no mediocre performances.
Not every song they list in an album's playlist is available through YouTube but in the test searches I made for a number of classical and contemporary composers it was able to match up most of them.
Recordlective is not perfect however. The service is still in beta and it shows given the number of 500 error codes that I received when searching for certain artists and tracks. Holst for example seemed to pull errors on almost every page I tried to access. The accuracy of search results was much better when I selected a name from the fast search results that populate as you type in a name into the box.
These drawbacks aside given the fact that the Recordlective service is free (at least for now) it is well worth the look if you want to include music videos in your classroom offerings.