We all already know that Youtube is pretty cool and awesome…and an essential procrastination tool! But did you know about its Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool? My friend showed this to me the other day and I have to say that it’s pretty neat.
Yeah, that’s a bit of a mouthful to say. I guess that’s why the URL for it is just “/disco” added onto the original youtube.com — gotta love simplicity! So anyways, what is this? Well, the name and the page itself is actually pretty self-explanatory in my opinion. Again, I’m liking the simplicity of it. 🙂
Basically, you type in the song or artist you wish to listen to and hit the “Disco!” button. And what it does is compile for you a list of songs by the artist you searched for (or the artist of the song you searched). So if you really wanted to listen to one particular artist, you could search them up and this would generate a playlist of their songs for you (instead of you having to go to each separate video and make one yourself). But the usefulness of this feature doesn’t stop there; it suggests to you other songs or artists that are similar to what you looked for so you can add those songs to the playlist it has created for you (if you want to that is–and you can always take songs off the playlist it first created).
If you like the playlist, you can save it! If not, clear it and start over. A playlist just means it will move from one video/song to the next instead of you having to click on a new one every time a video or song finishes. In addition to making a playlist, it also gives you a quick blurb about the artist you looked up.
However, I guess there are a few downsides to this. If you enter a song name on its own without knowing the artist, it usually gives you the most popular song, which is not necessarily the one you were searching for. But I guess that’s a downside for normal Youtube searches anyways. Plus, you can also always do all of these searches on the normal website and just use the “Related Videos” box…and get a video that’s not about 1/8th the size of your screen or something.
But I think this is a nifty feature regardless. I’m still not entirely sure what this feature of Youtube is called though; I just call it Youtube Disco…for simplicity’s sake!
Happy song hunting!