For anyone in this position, don’t forget [email protected] - maybe someone can help identify what you’re after.

On the Other place, one of my favourite time killers was to go through the various subs devoted to identifying music/movies/books/etc based on small clips, screenshots or even just descriptions.

Don’t think there are equivalents on Lemmy, but TipOfMyTongue can kind of serve that purpose :-)

Was a song I hadn’t heard for well over a decade. Bought a Blu-ray player from a thrift store. Whoever got rid of it forgot to sign out of Pandora, which was pre installed on it alongside some Blockbuster program of all things. Ended up using the account because I figured nobody would care (otherwise the original account owner(s) might try to unlink the account from the device if possible) and the song randomly came on. Happened maybe almost a year ago.

It was The Middle by Jimmy Eat World.

There’s a Kiwi reggae band called Fat Freddy’s Drop, and I got the mp3s of their first album Based on a True Story from a friend not too long after it came out. Later I lost them on an old HD, and when I went to get the album again most of the songs were different versions, and noticeably worse than what I remember. I’ve been able to track down a few of the old versions over the years but not all of them.

Part of the difficulty is not knowing what the versions I first heard were. They didn’t sound live so it’s not as simple as trying to find concert versions. Trying to find a specific version of a song can be more frustrating than not knowing what a song is entirely :/

14 years ago when I was still relatively young and liked clubbing, a song popped up and swept all the playlists in my country. Clubs, radio stations, you name it. Catchy French song. It came and went so fast that I didn’t manage to memorise it. That was long before I even dreamed of having a smartphone. When I moved to UK a year later, nobody had any idea what song I’m trying to describe, like they never heard it.

Probably around 8 years ago I was roaming the streets of Porto with my ex, and a shop we passed had the song blasting from the speakers. Praise the smartphones, I used ‘what’s the song’ app and et voila: Stromae - alors on danse

A song evaded me for maybe 5 or 6 years once. I ended up having this same conversation about evasive songs with someone and did my best at an impression, because it’s instrumental.

“Doo-d’ Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo, Doo-d’ Doo Doo, Doodoo Doo…”

The person I was talking to instantly said it was Eple - Röyksopp, and was entirely correct.

Not a song per say. But vague over used band names.

I’m really into synthwave right now and there are two artists I want to listen to. 1. Victim 2. Anne.

Good luck searching for these artists.

Years ago, I downloaded a relaxed-tempo, acoustic version of “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, that was fantastic. I lost it when my stupid, proprietary NAS decided to re-initialize both RAID disks. I’ve searched repeatedly, but all that ever comes up is Dave Grohl’s solo performance on The Howard Stern Show.

A techno mix made with Super Mario bros. from the early 2000s most likely from Napster or Kazaa. It wasn’t a melody from any of the Mario games, but it was constructed with sounds from it.

There was a song that played on the radio a really long time ago, I remember that someone had requested it, and I remember how it sounded, but not any of the lyrics. It sounded really heavenly, a woman with a highish voice was singing, and the song sounded really old fashioned but also kind of new at the same time. It sounded like nothing that would’ve played on the station it was playing on, it was actually kinda jarring in the best way possible. I wish I could find it!

The best way I can describe it is that it had a really similar vibe to Les Fleur by Minnie Riperton, particularly the quieter parts. The singer would end their vocals in an “ahh” kind of sound.

When I was a young teen, one of my friends gave me a floppy disk of midi song files she liked a lot but they mostly had names like “ANIME 2” so I had no idea where they came from. There was one on there I was particularly obsessed with but could never find. Then one serendipitous day, I did. It was The Destruction of Laputa from Castle in the Sky.

Edit: Or it was Sora from Escaflowne. There’s been a few times I heard an instrumental or non-English song with no source to go off of.

Old rave music mixtapes.

I had a tape labeled as “sluggo vs urban: annihilation” that I simply loved to death. The tapes are long gone and I never found the artists/DJs again.

I remember listening to a metal song while I played my Xbox 360 back when i was in high school. Even back then I never knew the title since I stole it from my sister’s computer. Recently I’ve been racking my head against the wall trying to find it again and I kept googling one lyric I remember but it coming up as Purple Rain by Prince which was way off from the songs genre. I tried everything from trying to recreate the song on the piano, asking friends, googling and more googling. Eventually I just gave up until I watched a youtube video about metal songs without the metal. And, by PURE COINCIDENCE the song was in the video.

It was Walk by Pantera.

As a kid I had heard Got my Mind Set on you by George Harrison on the radio once or twice.

A few years later when I was starting to listen to music for myself I heard the Weird Al parody, and wanted to track down the original. I didn’t remember any lyrics to the original so the best I could do was accost people with a very poorly sung chorus of “this song is just six words long.”

It didn’t go well. I didn’t find the original until the Internet had caught up enough for me to find it easily.

I had a similar arc with Downtown by Petula Clark. Thankfully without me trying to sing a parody chorus at anyone.

My main electronic music growing up was Hard-Trance and then DnB, but we had a friend who DJed House/Big Beat and he would drop this feelgood banger that would get us smiling.

Lost the name of it for about 7 years before someone knew what I was talking about, then I forgot the name for about another 10 years before getting it again.

Will never forget it now.

Tune was only known to us as the ‘RingKingKing song’ Link here

Took me years to find Ievan polkka