Let Youtube be the DJ – music discovery service launched

Youtube gets into music recommendation with a Last.fm style project called the Youtube Music Discovery Project. They launched it quietly – it’s still a Test Tube project rather than something you can access on the main site.

Go to www.youtube.com/disco to try it out. Type a band name or genre into the search box and it generates an automatic playlist

Features that make it slightly better than last.fm:
– You can see what the list is going to play in advance
– You can edit the playlist, taking out songs or adding new ones from the list of songs of the artist you search for.
– In last.fm that you only got one or two songs from the artist you requested, in this Youtube site you get more with the option to include all songs available from the artist you chose.

Downside: you have to click “next video” everytime you want to move onto the next song. That’s a bit rubbish and means you can’t just sit back and listen to it.
Youtube does seem to have quite a comprehensive catalogue these days, thanks to channels like Vevo and EMI so finding songs isn’t a problem, but sometimes the videos have ads built into them which means your listening is disrupted by audio ads occasionally.

Oh and of course streaming videos eats more data than that just music so depends on your connection.

Worth a try? Yes: www.youtube.com/disco