YouTube launches a music video discovery page
Thursday, July 22, 2010 14:45YouTube has long been more than just a place for leave Britney alone videos and the occasional piece of pirated content, it’s also become a place for legitimate movie trailers and rentals, TV shows, and music videos. The latter of which has been under the onus of the content providers and users to curate.
However, that’s no longer the case with a new section of the site called YouTube.com/music that wrangles all of the hosted music videos and puts them into neatly sorted categories. On top of it all is a section for “today’s hits” which is a listing of the most popular music videos that have been played on the service; YouTube says this is updated every two hours.
To play an entire genre, YouTube is utilizing its playlist feature. There’s nothing special here besides the fact that users can drill down in any song to see a listing of other tracks by that artist, as well as other artists that might sound similar. Though combined with the recently inked Rumblefish deal, these pages are likely to become a jumping off point for users who want to license those tracks to use in their own personal videos.
Along with the genres and what’s popular, YouTube plans to introduce a localization feature to the Music home page that will pull up nearby concerts. Presumably, it will use the same location-finding technology that helps Google Maps users find geotagged YouTube videos.
