Online music streaming holdings are surpassing in-library collections, but who's counting?

The move to online collections is gathering momentum in the area of sound recordings, with several new subscriptions bringing the total of online music available to the York community to about 27,000 albums, or, if we go by the new method of counting, about 400,000 tracks.  These are collections aimed at educational institutions, largely covering traditional areas in music curricula such as classical, jazz and world musics, so you won't find the Rolling Stones or Nirvana (and you won't find the Beatles legitimately available anywhere on the internet, at least until they are licensed). However, there is a wealth of smaller, independent labels, of whose output we do own significant portions in either LP or CD format, but for which now the complete catalogues are available online.  All of these collections have interfaces that allow instructors to create playlists or link into the database, a real asset for online teaching modules.

This is what we have:

Smithsonian Global Sound: through this we have another complete run of Folkways records, including PDFs of all of the original hand-typed liner note essays, the 217 LP African Music Library, an ethnographic project from the 1950s documenting folk music of South Africa (we have the original LPs with a very elaborate classification system presented through colour-coded index cards), and access to material collected on the South Asian subcontinent from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). Also included are the Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, and Paredon labels, which include a variety of world, folk, and even sound effects libraries.

Naxos Fantasy Jazz Library: we now have the Original Jazz Classics series online, which includes portions, or in some cases complete runs, of the seminal Debut, Prestige, Riverside, Stax, Volt, Specialty, Pablo catalogues.  Notable titles: complete Riverside recordings of Thelonious Monk ... Bill Evans … Wes Montgomery.

DRAM (Database of Recorded American Music): we now have the entire New World Records, which "preserves neglected treasures of the past and nurtures the creative future of American music," Albany Records, CRI, Deep Listening, and the curiously named Mutable Music.

Naxos Music Online: the largest collection, with over 18,000 CDs, representing the entire Naxos, Marco Polo and Da Capo catalogues, not to mention Lyrichord and Wergo.  There are also a number of somewhat idiosyncratic subcollections of music that no one has ever heard of, but these could be useful for the study of the marginal, or simply as sources of amusement.

Classical Music Library: a selection of small classical labels such as Arabesque, CBC, Bridge, Mode, Nimbus, and a smattering of titles from the larger labels such as EMI and Hyperion.

A note on listening: people often complain that listening to music streamed over the internet into their computers with their little "multimedia" speakers is not the same as listening to a CD on a real sound system, but by hooking up your computer to a home stereo system you're able to get what's called "near CD" quality sound, save for a few blips every now and then when the network gets congested or your computer can't handle the processing ... but these problems are bound to iron themselves out.