Recently, content-based music information retrieval (MIR) systems for mobile devices have attracted great interest. However, music retrieval systems are greatly affected by background noise when music is recorded in noisy environments. Therefore, we evaluated various pre-processing methods using the Philips method to determine the one that performs most robust music retrieval in such environments. We found that dynamic noise reduction (DNR) is the best pre-processing method for a music retrieval system in noisy environments.