Did you know that the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center offers free streaming access to millions of pieces of music? The University Libraries subscribes to services that allow the University of Nevada, Reno faculty, staff, and students to directly stream audio and video content without having to pay for it. Most of the content provided by these services is not available on Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube.

Streaming Classical and Jazz Audio Recordings

The library subscribes to Naxos Music Library, a digital library of more than two million music tracks including symphonic, solo, vocal, and chamber music. The content includes recordings made by established artists and includes a variety of styles and genres, ranging from Baroque operas and Beethoven symphonies to collections of children’s songs, Christmas music, and movie scores. You can create private and public playlists and can search by artist, piece, album, and genre. If jazz is your passion, Naxos Music Library Jazz offers over 200,000 tracks, including classic and contemporary jazz recordings. You can also visit the Music Online: Jazz Music Library, which provides access to thousands of jazz artists, ensembles, albums, and genres.

The Met Opera and Berlin Philharmonic: Live and Archived Performances!

The Metropolitan Opera offers access to more than 700 archived performances, including some of the most recent or popular productions on their streaming site Met Opera on Demand. Each opera has an introduction, captions with English translations, and a tracklist that allows you to skip or jump to certain scenes. The Berlin Philharmonic provides a similar service, but in addition to access to their archived concerts, the Berlin Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall includes access to live concerts, interviews, and documentaries. Both services allow you to create a personalized account so that you can save your favorite performances and receive notification of upcoming events. 

Smithsonian Global Sound

Smithsonian Global Sound essentially provides a survey of music from around the world with a more in-depth exploration of American genres including folk songs, spirituals, gospel music, Native American songs, ragtime, protest songs, etc. The recordings also include stories, oral histories, and poetry recitations. You can browse by genre or places or can search for specific songs or albums.

About University Libraries

The University Libraries embrace intellectual inquiry and innovation, nurture the production of new knowledge, and foster excellence in learning, teaching and research.  During each academic year, the Libraries welcomes more than 1.2 million visitors across its network of three branch libraries: the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center, the DeLaMare Science and Engineering Library and the Savitt Medical Library. Visitors checked-out more than 90,000 items and completed more than 2 million database searches.