Music is an important part of the site, but YouTube keeps ignoring it

Aug 17, 2013 13:31 GMT  ·  By

YouTube is taking another shy step towards embracing its music service side and experimenting with a new music box. The new box is very similar to a Google Knowledge Graph card and lists a number of top tracks and albums from the artist you were searching for as well as suggestions for similar artists.

If you click on any of the songs listed, you'll get a playlists of the most popular music videos from that artist.

In a second experiment spotted by the Google Operating System blog, YouTube is testing a tweaked version of the YouTube Mix playlist.

The feature now works more like an online radio, i.e. like Pandora, by only giving users a "next" button and by removing the playlist video count. The idea is, you select a YouTube mix and then listen to all the music you want without having to manage it in any way.

You can test both experiments for yourself, Google Operating System explains how you can enable them in your browser.

Music has long been one of YouTube's biggest strengths. For all the competition in online music, with companies from Spotify to Pandora and, yes, to Google all trying to get people to pay for on-demand streaming, YouTube is still a larger music destination than any of them, by a huge margin.

For some reason though, either internal politics or lack of vision, YouTube has done very, very little over the years to provide better tools for music lovers. A custom YouTube player for music along with some management features would make YouTube an instant winner in the market.

Considering that YouTube is already the largest force in online music, without actually trying all that hard, any effort should pay off greatly for the site.

There is, of course, the very real possibility that YouTube is deliberately handicapping itself, for fear that rights holders may start asking for money for every video that plays, treating the site like a regular on-demand music service.

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The new YouTube music cards
The new YouTube Mix
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