We offer over 170,000 tracks of music from five online libraries.

Listen without charge over the Internet through speaker or headphones—either in the library or from home (with your library card number). 

American Song: Includes music that relates to almost every walk of American life, every ethnic group, and every time period. You’ll find songs by and about American Indians, miners, immigrants, slaves, children, pioneers, and cowboys. There are the songs of Civil Rights, political campaigns, Prohibition, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and anti-war protests. There are hymns, funny songs, college songs, sea shanties, shape note songs, and songs about topics as diverse as New York and electricity.

Classical Music Library: Classical music ranges from Medieval to contemporary, from choral works to symphonies, operas, and the avant-garde.

Contemporary World Music: Takes listeners around the globe to experience the vibrancy, history, customs, politics, personalities, struggles, and joys of diverse peoples and cultures. The breadth of this collection is impressive, incorporating contemporary reggae, worldbeat, neo-traditional, world fusion, Balkanic jazz, African film, Bollywood, Arab swing and jazz, and other genres. Traditional music such as Indian classical, fado, flamenco, klezmer, zydeco, gospel, gagaku is also featured to round out the offerings and allow you to see the progression that music has made through the ages.

Smithsonian Global Sound: American Folk Music covers icons such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and hundreds of others; freedom and protest songs from the Civil Rights era; the music of every cultural group, from Cajun to Alaskan; Ella Jenkins’s children’s songs; and music to represent America’s entire history.  World music includes traditional music from more than 150 countries; nations’ histories in song; counting games, childhood songs, holiday tunes, stories, and sing-alongs from around the world. Spoken word and sounds include artists such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois, Mahalia Jackson, Sterling Brown, and others performing their own works; political speeches; oral histories; biographies; sounds of the rainforest and of the galaxies.

African American Song: African American music covers every form (blues, jazz, gospel, etc.) and includes recordings by the fifty top names in the history of black American music—artists such as Ma Rainey, Lead Belly, Mahalia Jackson, Alberta Hunter, Tampa Red, William "Bunk" Johnson, Duke Ellington, Sophie Tucker, Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, Sarah Vaughn, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Big Joe Williams, Memphis Jug Band, Roosevelt Sykes, Dizzy Gillespie, Chicago River Kings, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Blind Willie McTell, Lonnie Johnson, Alberta Jones, Johnny Shines, and Memphis Minnie.

1. You must have a valid Princeton Public Library card barcode number in order to listen to music from these libraries at home.
2. At home, you will be asked to "Please enter your library card number".
3. You can access any of the music libraries from the library building, home or office.

From your account, you can create personal, password-protected playlists. Listen to streamed music from a computer for free or download music at a small cost (charged to your personal credit card). The audio selections are also cross-referenced to a database of supplementary reference information.

Before you begin using the Music Online service, take a moment to read how listening online works and list of compatible platforms and browsers.