Are you familiar with ccMixter? It’s a web site for samples and remixes that are released under various Creative Commons licenses. Nowthe site has a new addition: dig.ccMixter, available in beta at http://dig.ccmixter.org/.

Dig allows people who are looking for music to find it more easily, whether you’re seeking theme music for a podcast, or background music for a YouTube video, or whatever. And you can tell that from the front page: here you can explore podsafe music, free music for commercial projects, etc.

I did a search for instrumental. I got well over 650 results. Yow! Pulldown menus let me restrict my search results to just those songs that are free for commercial use, while another menu let me zero in on party music, coffeeshop music, etc.

Narrowing the search to “Cubicle Music” got my results down to over 250, but that’s still a lot. An “advanced dig” would allow me to search further by genre, instrument, and style.

Search results include track name and artist as well as license type. Additional buttons allow you to stream the song, download it (the downloads I looked at were in MP3 format), or get an informational window that provides details on the song. I was surprsied at how many different genres were represented here.

If you just want to taste the music available without doing a lot of searching, visit the Featured Page, which has both curator’s picks and popular music. This page also has several podcasts, so getting a quick 40 minutes of groove is as easy as subscribing to The Mixin’ Kitchen or Cool Music.

What a fun visit! Hmm… maybe ResearchBuzz needs a theme song…