You have to put a dot at the end of a domain name for a rooted search, or it's looked up locally first. If you're on a stanford.edu machine, and look up "music" or "art", you'll get the site for that department. If you want the "music" TLD (I wonder who gets that. The RIAA? iTunes? Myspace?), you have to type "music.". Unless you're really into DNS semantics, you probably don't know that.
That's an interesting point, but according to the man page for resolv.conf, the default for the ndots option is 1, meaning "if there are any dots in a name, the name will be tried first as an absolute name before any search list elements are appended to it." While you're correct that "music" won't work properly without the trailing dot, my guess is that most actual sites would be something like "www.music" (or something a bit more whimsical, such as "my.music"). In these cases, the name contains the requisite minimum one dot, thus hinting to the resolver that this is indeed an absolute name (specifically "www.music." or "my.music.").