How to Find the Song Used in a YouTube Video

You have just finished watching a video on YouTube and really liked the song that was playing in that video. Unfortunately, you couldn’t recognize the name of the song and the video description too has no information about the track.

What’s that song in the YouTube Video?

Here are some tricks to help you find the name of a song that’s used in a YouTube video:

Option #1 - Some videos on YouTube include background music from YouTube’s Audio Swap Library and it is relatively easy to determine the audio track in such cases. Here’s how.

While you are on a YouTube video page, click the video statistics button (available below the video player) and you will see detailed information about the song including the name of the artist and the album. This trick will only work for videos that are using music from the Audio Swap Library.

Option #2 - If a YouTube video includes a popular sound track, you can use a music identification services to figure out the name of that song. These services can identify instrumental music as well.

First install Shazam on your mobile phone, launch the app, play the YouTube video on your desktop and bring the phone near the computer speaker. Alternatively, if these apps aren’t available for your mobile phone, you can use Midoni  on the desktop computer to identify the YouTube music.

Option #3 - Twitter can also help you in your research.

Put the YouTube video ID (not the video URL) in the Twitter Search box and you’ll see a list of all tweets that mention that video. Maybe some of these tweets will have more information about the video or you can consider contacting the people who shared that video on Twitter for clues. This is a good option when you are trying to research foreign music.

I recommend searching Twitter for YouTube Video IDs instead of URLs as people may use different URLs in tweets but the ID in the URL will always be the same.

Option #4 - If you can understand the lyrics of the music video, transcribe the first few lines and put them in Google. Obvious solution but worth including in the list.

Option #5 - For popular YouTube videos, you may even find the song name from the comments section itself because there could be other people who are just as curious as you to learn more about that song.

Here’s the trick. While you are on a YouTube page, click the “All Comments” link and set the sort order “by thread” - now press Ctrl+F to open the browser’s Find box and search for keywords like “song,” “music” or even “tune.”

Also see: The Best Chrome Extensions for YouTube

When nothing works, compose a new YouTube Message, put the name of the YouTube user who uploaded the video in the TO box and send him a message with your query. They may get back to you with the name of the song. Good luck!

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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