May 18, 2007
Last.tv is a music video player which matches your music taste from last.fm to videos on YouTube.
It automates selection of music videos and provides effortless continuous play as a television channel. You don’t even need to select your own videos, since data from your Last.fm music profile is retrieved to create a continuous playlist of videos from artists you listen to.
You just have to turn it on, like watching MTV, except this time its all your favourite clips !
You can use your own last.fm account or use someone else’s account, which is a great idea, meaning you can discover new artists from accounts of people who seem to share your taste…
Last.tv matches videos based on artist names. Besides retrieving premium music videos, this also turns up live performances, bootlegs, interviews and fan interpretations. This is unique content which would never be aired on regular music video channels.
May 13, 2007
Launched in May 2007, Middio makes an effort of properly tagging the most popular music videos uploaded by members to YouTube. Although the music videos are hosted by YouTube, they can be searched for and watched on Middio without ads (for the moment…).
Middio only indexes music videos that were lawfully uploaded to YouTube by either the artist or studio owning rights to it. Videos uploaded by fans do not seems to be indexed, which reduces the power of community, but should allow the music videos not to be removed for copyright violations and thus to remain available in a long term…
Middio claims that the only videos they index are uploaded by Sony BMG, Interscope, UMG, and tons of artists who own the rights to their work.
Over 5000 music videos were already indexed before the launch of the website, and more than 10000 were supposed to be available at the launch.
You can follow the Middio blog for more information on coming evolutions of the service.
May 7, 2007
MusicMesh is an interesting way to discover new artists or listen to your favorite music.
This site, launched by a German company called Vitabu, allows not only to listen, but actually watch to music videos from YouTube.
Why using videos from Youtube ?
First this is a way to avoid (or try to avoid) legal issues for music or video streaming of copyrighted content. Indeed, using “bad or medium quality” videos rather than pure audio files such as mp3s does not allow users to easily download and share music. Moreover videos are hosted by another company (responsibility is thus not so clear in case of legal prosecution).
Then comes the hard load of servers for streaming. With this model, MusicMesh does not host nor stream any multimedia content at all, since all the streaming load goes to YouTube.
How does it work ?
MusicMesh is very easy to use either to search for your favorite artist music videos or simply to discover new artists related to your favorites.
You can search for an artist from a simple search form or out of a very small (way too small in my opinion) artist cloud:
(more…)
