YouTube Gets into Music Discovery

YouTube is on a roll these days and the new features just keep on coming. The video site just launched an HTML5 version of its players for those clamoring for open and standard alternatives to the Flash-based one, which, incidentally, just got a touch up, but it's not stopping here, YouTube also introduced a new, experimental music discovery feature. Creatively dubbed YouTube Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool, it does what the very precise title suggests.

With music videos as popular as even online, and grabbing the top spots in the most viewed charts at YouTube, this is a market which the site should pay very close attention to. You could argue that it already does that with the recently launched Vevo, a joint venture with the major music labels, and quite successfully too as the site is already the most popular music site in the US. But, while a hub dedicated to most of the music videos on YouTube is a good idea, Vevo, as a service, doesn't really do anything out of the ordinary, it's a place where you'll find music videos and that's it.

With the new experimental tool, YouTube is finally taking its huge inventory and doing something relatively innovative with it. Music discovery sites certainly aren't something new, there are several strong players in the market both in terms of the number of users and also of the quality of the service. And YouTube's implementation doesn't challenge even the mediocre ones, but it doesn't have to.

The tool asks you to enter the name of an artist or a band and then presents you with all the videos from that artist, but also suggestions of similar ones you might like. The suggestions seem accurate enough, there aren't too many strange choices, but they're rather limited in range focusing on just a few bands or artists. Obviously, since this is something new to YouTube engineers, the limitations aren't that surprising. On the other hand, YouTube's regular suggestion algorithm which serves 'related' videos is several years in the making and adapting it to focus on music shouldn't be that much of a hassle.

And if there's one thing Google engineers know, it's algorithms, so this should improve significantly over time. The rest of the page is rather spartan and utilitarian, this is Google so no surprises here either. Even with its rather modest beginnings, if Google decides to invest in a music discovery tool for YouTube, it could be a major development solely based on its size. YouTube is the most popular video site in the world, by a fair margin, and it's one of the biggest sites overall so the feature has a guaranteed audience.