MSiMDb stands for Media Samples in Music Database. The goal is to index songs that sample non-musical media — think movies, shows, games, speeches, and so on.
Not to be confused with songs sampling other songs. For example:
No — but yeah, there’s a lot of metal. I’m a metalhead, so the DB reflects that. But all genres are welcome. Anyone can contribute, no login or personal info required.
Artists include media samples for a reason. Sometimes it’s to sound badass. Sometimes it adds meaning. Either way, it blends worlds — and that’s something I love.
With MSiMDb, you might:
That’s the point.
A significant portion of MSiMDb's catalogue originates from the Encyclopaedia of Industrial Music Sample Sources, a database that lived on sloth.org from the mid-1990s until the early 2000s.
It was built collaboratively by contributors on rec.music.industrial, a Usenet newsgroup where fans obsessively identified movie and TV dialogue sampled in industrial, EBM, and electronic music. At its peak, the list catalogued over 1,300 sample sources across hundreds of artists, from Skinny Puppy and Front 242 to Ministry and Wumpscut.
The database was notable enough to be cited in academic research. In their 2001 paper for the Soundscape Studies conference at Dartington College, Philip Tagg and Karen E. Collins described it as "an extensive database put together mainly by the news group rec.music.industrial listing sources of movie samples used by many industrial bands," noting that 32% of the 860 samples they identified came from "technological dystopias and other science fiction" films.
Tagg, P. & Collins, K.E. (2001). The Sonic Aesthetics of the Industrial: Re-Constructing Yesterday's Soundscape for Today's Alienation and Tomorrow's Dystopia. Paper for Soundscape Studies conference, Dartington College. [HTML] [PDF]
When sloth.org went offline, that knowledge largely disappeared from the living web. Some of it survives on the Wayback Machine, but it was essentially frozen in time: a snapshot of a pre-Spotify, pre-streaming era when identifying a two-second movie clip in a song required genuine expertise and collective effort.
MSiMDb aims to give that work a second life, enriched with modern metadata, linked to streaming services, and open to new contributions across all genres. If you were one of the original rec.music.industrial contributors: thank you. This one's for you.
You can search by song, artist, movie, or anything else.
Click behavior:
This site is run by a private individual who prefers to stay anonymous. It’s non-commercial, non-professional.
Hosted by Gandi SAS, 63–65 Boulevard Masséna, Paris, France, as per LCEN Article 6, III, 2.
This site is legal under French quotation rights. If you’re a rights-holder and want content removed, just ask politely via the email link at the bottom of every page. No drama.
Posters come from TMDb, album covers from Spotify and the Cover Art Archive, or wherever I can dig them up. A large portion of the sample data was sourced from the sloth.org Encyclopaedia of Industrial Music Sample Sources via archive.org.