Everyone has one. A song you heard somewhere — a shop, a film, a friend's car — and now you have four words of it and an intense need to hear it again.
The good news is that the fragments people remember are often enough.
The bad news is that most people search badly, give up after two attempts, and lose the song for another six months.
Search from the strongest clue you have.
Not necessarily the most impressive clue. The one you're most confident is actually correct.
Here's the order of attack that works best.
Start with what you're most confident about
The single most useful habit is simple: search the thing you're surest of, not the thing that seems most identifying.
People instinctively search for the artist because that feels like the obvious handle.
But a half-remembered artist name can send you in completely the wrong direction, while five words from a chorus you're certain about may get you there almost immediately.
Confidence beats specificity.
Search the fragment you'd be willing to bet is actually right.
Lyrics: use the odd words
If you have part of a line, use it — but use it carefully.
Take the strangest words
Common words appear in thousands of songs. Unusual words, or unusual combinations, narrow the field much faster.
Search the exact phrase
If you're confident in the wording, put the phrase in quotation marks in a general web search. Lyrics pages are heavily indexed and exact phrases can be extremely effective.
Assume you may have misheard it
Sung words are easy to misinterpret. If the full phrase fails, search only the two or three words you're most certain about alongside the word “lyrics”.
Weak clue
“Baby, I love you”
Too common. You'll get an enormous number of unrelated results.
Better clue
Two unusual words together
Rare combinations cut through thousands of generic lyric matches very quickly.
Once you have the title, that's when you come back to the music app and actually play it.
Zene's search covers music, podcasts, radio, video and entertainment in one place, so once you know the name, one search can surface the things connected to it.
No lyrics? Use the circumstances
Sometimes you don't remember a single word. You only remember where you heard it.
That can still be enough.
A film scene
Search for “song from [film] [scene]”. Soundtracks and scene-specific questions are widely documented online.
An advert
Search the brand, year and anything you remember about the ad. Commercials generate huge numbers of song-identification searches.
TV, games or sport
Episode numbers, mission names, match dates and event names are all useful anchors.
Era + one distinctive detail
Something like “2011 indie song with whistling” can work better than you'd expect because somebody else may have asked the same question before.
Context is searchable.
“Where did I hear this?” can sometimes be a better clue than “what did it sound like?”
Ask people, properly
Human beings remain remarkably good at identifying half-remembered songs, and many people genuinely enjoy trying.
But the quality of the answer depends almost entirely on the quality of the question.
Bad question
“What's that song that goes da da daaa?”
Better question
Where you heard it.
Rough year or era.
Male or female voice.
Fast or slow.
Instruments you noticed.
Any words you remember.
What artist it reminded you of.
Five uncertain details can be more useful than one supposedly perfect detail.
If you can hum it
If the melody is still in your head, use a melody-identification tool instead of trying to force the tune into text.
Several search and music-identification tools can work from humming, singing or whistling.
Text search finds words and names. Audio matching finds sounds and melodies. Use the kind of search that matches the clue you actually have.
Once the tool gives you a likely title, bring that title back to the app where you actually listen.
Searching well inside a music app
Once you have a title, artist name, or even part of one, a few habits make app search much more effective.
1
Watch the suggestions
Search suggestions often narrow toward real titles and names before you've finished typing, which can also rescue minor spelling mistakes.
2
Use category filters
If one word is shared by songs, artists, podcasts and videos, filtering to the type you want removes a lot of noise.
3
Search the artist, then browse
If you know the artist but not the song title, open the artist page and look through releases instead of repeatedly guessing titles.
4
Try fewer words
Long queries can fail because one remembered word is wrong. Two strong words often work better than six uncertain ones.
5
Try spelling variations
Artist names are often stylised in unusual ways. If nothing appears, try a simpler or more phonetic spelling and watch the suggestions.
When it's genuinely not there
Occasionally you've identified the song correctly and still can't find it in a particular catalogue.
That can happen because of regional availability, rights changes, an unreleased recording, a track being removed, or a specific version not being distributed everywhere.
A missing result doesn't always mean the search is broken.
Sometimes the exact recording simply isn't available in that catalogue or region.
Try alternative versions:
Live recording
Concert releases can exist even when the original studio track doesn't.
Compilation appearance
The same track may exist on a soundtrack, compilation or collection.
Different album edition
Deluxe, remastered and regional versions can have different availability.
Alternate recording
Acoustic, radio, remixed or re-recorded versions may still be present.
Save it this time
This is the last step, and the one everybody forgets.
When you find it, save it immediately.
Two seconds now is easier than repeating the entire search eight months from now.
Add it to a playlist — any playlist. It doesn't need to be organised.
In fact, there's a useful case for keeping one deliberately messy playlist for exactly this job.
Make a “found it” playlist.
No theme. No sorting. Just a net for songs you encounter in films, shops, cars, cafés, adverts and real life.
After a year, it often becomes one of the more interesting playlists in your Library because almost everything in it reached you by accident rather than through a recommendation system.
Remember the clue. Find the title. Save the song.
The best search technique is the one that prevents you from having to search for the same song twice.
Search across music, podcasts, radio, video and entertainment in Zene on Android, iPhone and iPad, and the web.
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