We’ve all been there before, watching an episode of TV when all of a sudden you hear a really cool song playing in the background. Only problem is that you’ve never heard it before or can’t for the life of you recall who the artist is let alone the song title, so now you’re stuck racking your brain trying to remember or Googling super vague search terms hoping to find the proverbial needle in the haystack.
But there is a better way. In fact, there’s a few better ways to hunt down a song title and / or artist, here’s four:
1. Tunefind.com
This website is one of my favorite go-to resources for discovering songs from TV shows. Not only does Tunefind.com provide a list of songs for each episode, but it also typically includes a description of the scene that the song played during so you can more easily narrow down the results. And if you have the reverse problem, where you’re trying to figure out where you’ve heard a song before, Tunefind.com can also help with that. Just search by artist instead.
2. IMDB’s Soundtracks Section
On IMDB.com, if you go to a specific episode of a TV show, under the “Did You Know?” header you might find a section called “Soundtracks”. As the name indicates, that’s where you can find information about the music used for a particular episode. However, I spot checked a few random episodes from a couple of different TV shows and not all of them had that section so you might get lucky and find what you’re looking for, or you might have to search elsewhere.
3. Spotify Playlists
Some TV shows have official Spotify playlists, these are particularly useful. Even user created playlists tend to be reliable and quite comprehensive so give Spotify a search and listen.
4. YouTube Comments
If you’re really stuck or don’t mind a challenge and aren’t afraid of comment sections on the Internet, you can also search for the scene on YouTube and hope that someone else has already posed the “what song is that”?” question in the comments. Then you just have to hope that someone else was kind enough to answer. I generally try to avoid even glancing at YouTube comments because more often than not they are full of hate, but I have had success with this method. Proceed with caution.
If you have any tips or tricks for figuring out what song is playing during an episode, leave them in the comments below.
