What song is this?

The easy case. A recognition app listens for a few seconds and returns the title. Shazam is free and built into the iPhone: add Music Recognition to the Control Center, or ask Siri “what song is this?”. On Android, the Google app recognizes music from the microphone in its search bar, and Pixel phones can even show the song on the lock screen by themselves (Now Playing).

Get closer to the speaker, stop talking, and aim for a moment where the music is alone. In a loud bar or shop it may take two or three tries. Recognition works on recordings, not on what a band plays live: a concert version is often a miss.

Brands post their commercials on YouTube, studios post trailers, and many scenes from series circulate as official clips. Find that clip, paste its link, and the music is listened to without you having to be quick with your phone.

Two traps. Music in an ad is sometimes a version re-recorded for the campaign, which only exists if it was released. And trailer music is often not in the film at all: studios use dedicated trailer tracks, often from trailer-music libraries rather than from the film’s composer.

On the radio, most stations publish a list of the songs they played with the time of broadcast: find the slot on the station’s website. On a computer, paste the video link if the music comes from the web; otherwise Shazam exists for Mac, and recognition can run from a phone held near the speakers.

And when nothing finds it, the music may simply not be released anywhere (a creator’s own beat, a jingle, an unsigned local artist) or too transformed to match. Asking in the video’s comments, or on communities dedicated to naming songs, is the last resort. Our song recognition statistics show how often a video returns nothing, and why.