Filed under: Audio, Video, Google, Freeware
YouTube has been a favorite place for music fans to watch and listen to music videos for a long time now. Along with official music videos, there are all sorts of treasures to be found, particularly when it comes to obscure live performances.
It looks like YouTube is embracing the fact that it is increasingly being used as a music service, and has launched a new project called the Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool. The URL is dead easy to remember: youtube.com/disco.
The tool allows you to enter an artist or band name, and press a big "Disco!" button. The resulting page features a description of the artist or band you chose, with a sample playlist of related tracks pre-populated. You also get a list of the artist's songs that are available on YouTube that you can add to the playlist, and a list of links to "related" artists.
The related artists list seems somewhat arbitrary; when I searched for Poison (hey, don't judge me), it came up with a list that included Bell Biv DeVoe, Beyoncé, The Prodigy, and at least 7 bands featuring the word "Poison" somewhere in their name. Looking a little deeper, the random-seeming artists all have a song with the word "Poison" in them. So clearly YouTube is using simple word matching instead of any sort of sophisticated algorithm to choose related artists.
Your playlist remains persistent as you search for other artists or click on the related ones, so you can build a playlist over time. Though the sound quality of YouTube videos varies greatly, I can imagine this tool being used for creating party playlists; with an archive of almost any song you can think of, it's a great resource with built-in song visualizations. Unfortunately, you can't leave it in full-screen mode; each song transition kicks you back to the playlist with the video in a small window.
YouTube's new Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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