The huge amount of multimedia information available nowadays makes its manual processing prohibitive, requiring tools for automatic labelling of these contents. This paper describes a framework for assessing a music detection tool; this framework consists of a database, composed of several hours of radio recordings that include different types of radio programmes, and a set of evaluation measures for evaluating the performance of a music detection tool in detail. A tool for automatically detecting music in audio streams, with application to music information retrieval tasks, is presented as well. The aim of this tool is to discard the audio excerpts that do not contain music in order to avoid their unnecessary processing. This tool applies fingerprinting to different acoustic features extracted from the audio signal in order to remove perceptual irrelevancies, and a support vector machine is trained for classifying these fingerprints in classes music and no-music. The validity of this tool is assessed in the proposed evaluation framework.