LibGuides: Music: Streaming Media

Streaming Audio

These are some selected streaming music & audio databases available to the Barnard/Columbia community. When off-campus, you'll need a UNI to log-in to the databases.

For a full, up-to-date list of video databases that Barnard/Columbia subscribe to, click this CLIO link.

Naxos Music Library
Naxos Music Library has over 124,000 full albums and over 1.8 million tracks of streaming music in a variety of areas, mostly focusing on Western art classical, film music, and world music. Naxos is organized by album, not by individual track, so you click on an album to see the pieces within. Select the boxes next to the pieces you want to listen to, and click "Play selections" on the left side of the page. Naxos has an app that lets you stream its recordings through a tablet or smartphone, as well. To use this, make a free account under "playlists." Many of the albums also have PDFs with liner notes.
The database of recorded American music
Contains over 7,000 compositions, including classical, folk, opera, jazz, country, early rhythm and blues, musical theater, experimental music, electronic music, early rock and Native American music from the United States. Labels include New World Records, CRI, Albany, innova, Cedille, XI, Pogus, Deep Listening and Mutable.
Smithsonian global sound
Offers audio and video downloads, streaming media, educational resources, and detailed liner notes for traditional roots music. The collection includes the published recordings owned by the non-profit Smithsonian Folkways Recordings label and the archival audio collections of the legendary Folkways Records, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, Paredon and other labels. Includes music recorded around the African continent for the International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University and material collected on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), sponsored by the American Institute for Indian Studies.
Contemporary world music
Contemporary world music contains 50,000 tracks that delivers the sounds of all regions from every continent. Contains important genres such as reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz and other genres such as traditional music - Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku and more. This database is a complementary database to Smithsonian global sound for libraries - it includes a blend of contemporary and traditional world music recordings from many labels throughout the world
Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings
Delve into the cultural study of music and explore content from across the globe with this diverse and comprehensive collection. Produced in collaboration with the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, the material in this collection includes thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film footage, field notebooks, slides, correspondence and ephemera from over 60 fields of study.
Naxos Music Library: Jazz
Has over 100,000 tracks of jazz music from over 260 labels. The search and play are the same as Naxos Music Library, but to create your own playlists, Naxos Jazz has a separate account.

Performing Arts

Alexander Street Video
Streaming video in a variety of areas from Alexander Street Press. Most have transcripts available.
Audio drama: The L.A. Theatre Works collection
Contains more than 300 important dramatic works in streaming audio from the curated archive of the nation’s premiere radio theatre company. The plays - which include some of the most significant dramatic literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries - are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening. Specialized indexing at the track level for over half of these recordings links individual segments of plays to specific academic disciplines and subject keywords. Critical essays, annotated playlists, and scene-level indexing
The plays are performed by leading actors from around the world and recorded specifically for online listening. The collection presents classics of the Western canon, modern works by American luminaries, originally commissioned plays, and high profile docudramas by both renowned and emerging playwrights. The plays are chosen not only for their literary significance, but also for their ability to challenge presumptions and examine complicated moral and ethical questions. by known figures in medicine, academia, politics, and other fields will draw connections from the plays to issues and topics in the humanities, social sciences, theatre, hard sciences, law, medicine, and other fields of study. Audio Drama's teaching tools include playlists, permanent URLs for electronic course reserves, and optional downloads.
BroadwayHD
Currently includes 19 of the full BroadwayHD individual videos of streaming performances, but will have up to 25 award-winning live Broadway plays and musicals curated especially for performing arts scholars
Dance in Video
Searchable database containing streaming video files of dance productions, interviews, coaching sessions, and documentaries by influential performers and companies from around the world. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as forerunners of the forms and the pioneers of modern concert dance. Videos can be browsed by people, role, ensemble, genre, and venue. Material types include documentaries, editorials, instructional, interviews, and performances. Database users may create their own custom playlists and video clips.
Digital Theatre Plus
Provides online access to a digital streaming video collection of unique films of current, leading British theatre productions. Includes behind-the-scenes documentaries as well as teaching and learning resources to facilitate a deeper understanding of the productions and texts. Learning resources include a detailed introduction, plot summary, character biographies, a relationship map, language analysis, scene study, performance background and historical context for each play.
Drama Online
Drama Online is a digital library of plays from Aeschylus to the present day. It also includes critical analysis, contextual information, A-Z reference and practical texts.
Includes the full text of plays from across the history of the theatre, ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, in addition to some video production of plays and audio recordings. Includes non-English-language works in translation, scholarly and critical editions, first night program texts, and critical analysis and contextual information. Critical interpretations, theatre history surveys and major reference works on authors, movements, practitioners, periods and genres are included alongside performance and practitioner texts, acting and backstage guides. Also includes images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos.
Educational streaming site / EAI
Also known as Electronic Art Intermix, EAI's Educational streaming site is a special subscription-access layer of the EAI online catalogue and provides access to full-length streaming videos for selected artists from EAI's full collection.
Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive
Online exhibit of brief video performance excerpts spanning from 1930s dance pioneers to today's most exciting artists recorded at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Massachusetts. Browse videos by artists, genres, or era. This website is a public project of the Virtual Pillow initiative which aims to build audiences and appreciation for dance and Jacob's Pillow.

Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and Moving Image Archive
Explore the Dance Division's digitized moving image and audio recordings.
Hemispheric Institute: Collections
The Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) is the first major digital video library of performance practices in the Americas. Created in 2005 in partnership with NYU Libraries, and with the inaugural support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, HIDVL began as an effort to preserve political performance works from the Americas, making these cultural documents available worldwide. This growing repository guarantees historical preservation and free access to over 1000 hours of documentation.

kweliTV
"Kweli means 'Truth' in Swahili. kweliTV celebrates global Black stories and amplifies Black storytellers from North America, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and Australia. Our mission is to curate and create content that is a true reflection of the global Black experience that’s oftentimes missing in traditional media."
medici.tv
Offers over 1800 HD webcasts from many leading festivals, including Aix-en-Provence, Saint-Denis, Aspen, Glyndebourne, and Lucerne, as well as from such music venues as the Opéra National de Paris, Auditorium du Louvre, Cité de la Musique, and Salle Pleyel in Paris, and Milan's La Scala. Many operas and concerts have been webcast both as live events and later as video-on-demand.
Met Opera on Demand
More than 450 Met performances. Dozens of Live in HD productions, classic telecasts from the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and '00s, and hundreds of radio broadcasts dating back to 1936.
National Theatre Collection
Drawing on 10 years of NT Live broadcasts, alongside high-quality recordings never previously seen outside of the NT’s Archive, the National Theatre Collection makes this rich body of work available to students in schools, universities and libraries around the world.
Naxos Video Library
A performing arts video collection with operas, ballets, documentaries, live concerts, and musical tours of historic places. Users may create their own playlists and custom video clips.

Numeridanse
Numeridanse offers free access to filmed performances, documentaries, interviews, fictions, dance videos. Many genres are showcased here: butoh, classical ballet, neo-classical ballet, baroque, Indian, African, flamenco, contemporary, traditional dances, hip-hop, tango, jazz, circus arts, performance, etc.

OntheBoards.TV
Provides access to films of full-length performances by artists working in dance, theater, music and other forms that defy categorization.
Routledge Performance Archive
Contains interviews with key figures in theatre history and contemporary practice; masterclasses with specialist actor trainers from around the world; unique footage direct from the legendary practitioners themselves; excerpted and full-length contemporary productions; and documentaries previously unavailable to global audiences. The video material spans more than fifty years of documented work direct from practitioners and specialists.
Royal Shakespeare Company Archives
The RSC Live Collection launched on Drama Online with 17 films of live productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company performed between 2013 and 2017.
Theatre in Video
Contains performances of the world's leading plays and film documentaries on the subject of theater in streaming video. Some plays presented in multiple productions exemplifying various interpretations of the text, and technical and cultural differences among the presentations. Stage work of directors and actors are cross-searchable and available for side-by-side comparison. Interviews with directors, designers, writers, and actors, along with excerpts of live performances, provide illustration of the development of texts and the productions.
UbuWeb
Important online repository for avant-garde arts, including music, film and video, poetry, writing. It has working relationships with Anthology Archives, WFMU, Roulette.org, and other NYC-area experimental music and art organizations. UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.

Video Data Bank
Launched in 2015, VDB TV is an innovative digital distribution project which provides free, online streaming access to curated programs of video and media art.
Sourced from the historically significant archives of the Video Data Bank, VDB TV includes work from early video pioneers active in the 1960s and 70s, through to emerging contemporary artists. VDB TV offers viewers across the United States and beyond access to rare video art, the opportunity to engage with programs conceived by a wide range of curators, and original writing, all while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work.