Video Sphere

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:

Then a cloud of CDs is proposed. You can navigate in this cloud by clicking on the CD you are interested in. Each CD can be easily recognized by its official cover.

By clicking on a CD, a new cloud with related music is proposed and the tracklist of the clicked CD is presented on the right panel. Another click on the track of your choice and a music video of this track is shown.

When more than one videos are available, you can browse all of them with the left and right arrows around the video panel.

One last option is proposed above the tracklist panel: it is possible to browse though reviews of the current CD, the artist’s Wikipedia Page, or a related Amazon page in case you would like to buy some music…

Technology used to propose similar music:

In order to provide content related to selected music, MusicMesh is using the Audioscrobbler database, also used by Last.fm. The Audioscrobbler system is a database that tracks listening habits and calculates relationships and recommendations based on the music people listen to.

Concrete issues with MusicMesh:

During my test of MusicMesh, I met 3 different issues:

First, when there is no video for a track you are interested in, you may find the CD and the tracklist, but you will be disappointed to see a laconic “No Video Found!”…

Since all videos are coming from YouTube and that a lot of them are copyrighted content, you could see a standard YouTube message “This video is no longer available” or “The owner of this video does not allow video embedding…”.

Finally, the search for music videos seems to be automatic. It means that if the artist name and track name are using too common words, you could watch a video that has nothing to do with what you are looking for (I had this only once so far).

Conclusion & possible improvements:

To conclude, I would say this is an interesting way to organize and browse music videos from YouTube. Nevertheless, it could be interesting to open MusicMesh to other video sharing websites and to propose an easy way to buy and download music (a link to iTunes and other platforms could be a good improvement).

Another great improvement could be to add a lyrics panel.