Soundtrack Gems bills itself as a curated film music archive of film music worth discovering. When the site launched five years ago during the COVID pandemic it functioned primarily as a list of soundtrack videos linked to YouTube. Building on that humble beginning this summer the site underwent a substantial rebuild and relaunch. The new version features a growing reference archive built around composers, individual scores, features, and curated listening guides.
Soundtrack Gems web page screenshot for Composer Archive: Dimitri Tiomkin, 2026.
Among those guides, the “Where to start with <composer name>” series offer thoughtful lists with descriptive text. Now when someone asks, “What did John Barry write?,” refer them to Soundtrack Gems.
For Barry, here is the Soundtrack Gems introduction.
John Barry’s Bond music is the obvious doorway, but it is only one room. This seven-score route through the archive follows the qualities that made his work distinctive across four decades.
The introduction is followed by the following seven soundtrack suggestions.
- The Ipcress File
- Born Free
- The Lion in Winter
- Midnight Cowboy
- Body Heat
- – 7. Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves
For each selection, such as The Ipcress File, there is a soundtrack profile, “Why this score matters,” sources and further reading, links to Listen on YouTube, and suggestions to continue exploring.
Explore by keyword search, film title, composer, decade, or genre. One small quibble, in the “People Behind the Music” Composers A-Z section the composer names are in direct order so “Adolph Deutsch” is found under “A” not “D.”
Soundtrack Gems home page, 2026.
Soundtrack Gems is the brainchild of Ben Kearey. Kearey’s background is in software development, but film music has been a long-standing interest. While there was not one particular film or soundtrack that drew him into film music, John Williams’ score for Star Wars made a strong impression and probably did more than anything else to make him consciously appreciate film music in its own right. From there, that interest naturally broadened into discovering other composers and scores.
The idea behind the website was to create a place to help people discover both major film composers and their scores that are less likely to receive attention, while also giving the YouTube collection more context than a playlist alone can provide. On YouTube, Soundtrack Gems is approaching 10,000 subscribers.
For the revamped website, there are more than 1,500 scores and an algorithm assigns a two-letter code to each film title, for example, HN for High Noon. Diehard soundtrack fans might want to repurpose the two-letter code for their favorite film soundtrack as their personalized identifier for Waymo (because using your own initials is boring)!
Waymo in Los Angeles with a two-letter personalized identifier, HN, for HIGH NOON, image created by ChatGPT.
Each month three scores from the collection are selected for a fresh hearing. Listening to the September choices, music from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Body Heat, and Vertigo, is a reminder of why this music from the cinema captures our imagination, lives in our collective memories, and continues to resonate long after the images have faded.
Just as precious stones are known for their beauty, rarity, and durability, the music tracks selected for Soundtrack Gems possess an enduring excellence of treasures, some remembered, some forgotten, and some discovered from film music’s rich and sometimes overlooked past.
Kearey explains, “The aim is ultimately quite simple: to make classic film music easier to discover and explore, and to direct readers towards authoritative resources where they can learn more about the composers and their work.”