Is YouTube the best music search engine out there?

Written on July 21, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Last Saturday, I had dinner with friends at their house, and I spent some time with their 14-year old kid, who had just gotten his first electrical guitar. He was teaching himself how to play it by checking out song scores and mimicing other people’s performances found on the web. I started challenging him to dig up some classics from artists like Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits to learn how to play them (he didn’t know any of them, which made me feel old, and I’m only 27). There’s a point to the story, don’t give up.

Every time I asked him to look up a song, he followed the same routine: he fired up YouTube and looked for the original track with a simple keyword search, just to listen a bit. Then, he looked up the scores for the song elsewhere, and then he went to back to YouTube to see if he could find someone who recorded himself playing the chords so he could mimic them. It was really interesting to see, and when I asked him if he knew of any sites who actually focus solely on learning how to play the guitar, he declined. If you’re wondering, there’s thousands of sites like that.

Driving back home, I realized that I often use YouTube to look up music too. Many times, I’m not actually looking for the video clip, just the tune, or maybe a live performance of the artist in question. There’s even software available to convert music from YouTube music videos to MP3, AVI, WMV, etc. And then there are websites who aggregate music videos from YouTube on their properties, like YouTubeMusic.ws and Clipmachine.

Evidently, the material is copyrighted more often than not (sites like Muzu TV, PluggedIn and Gotuit are trying to crack that nut), but that hasn’t stopped YouTube from becoming the default repository for music videos as far as I’m concerned. They realize this, which is why they’re working on securing licensing deals with the major record labels too. They’d be foolish not to.

Of course, while it’s easy to find popular music (say, Madonna) on YouTube, it’s a lot harder to find stuff from more obscure artists. Also, the social networking element of YouTube isn’t optimized for discovering new music and sharing it with your friends like Last.fm, iLike or MOG are. Another reason not to use YouTube for searching music videos would be the fact that there’s not a lot of HD content on there.

So calling YouTube the best music search engine is going out on a limb a bit, but I would very much like to see how many search queries on the video sharing site are actually music-related, and how the many music search engines out there are planning to compete with the sheer size of the Google-owned platform. I like checking out new websites like Mix Turtle as much as the next guy, but I’m pretty sure I’ll forget about it by next week.

Tell me, where do you go to find music?

I hope you like that post!

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google, music, music search, music search engine, music video, youtube

About the author: Robin Wauters is a Belgium-based social media consultant, startup advisor, blogger, entrepreneur, Twitter fanatic, conference organizer and allround web addict. Between trying out just about every new web application that gets in his sight, he advises local startups like ContactOffice, Oxynade and Yuntaa. And when he's not busy trying to keep tabs with what's going on in the virtualization & cloud computing industry as managing editor of Virtualization.com, he's probably working on the organization of Plugg, an annual celebration of European web entrepreneurship.

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15 comments/trackbacks to “Is YouTube the best music search engine out there?”

Jul 21, 2008: Is YouTube de beste muziekzoekmachine? | zoomz - Alles over internetvideo vanuit een zakelijk perspectief
[...] wordt steeds vaker gebruikt voor het zoeken van videoclips en muziek. Robin Wauters verteld op TheNextWeb waarom en geeft een paar goede tips voor onmisbare tools voor muziek en YouTube liefhebbers. [...]

By Joop Dorresteijn on Jul 21, 2008

Although I prefer Yahoo Music, in terms of quality, That said, Youtube is better in many ways… its overcomplete with songs, and, active users supply loads of collections in various area’s, which fun to look at in the weekend. Youtube should notch their audio quality up and offer playlist playing!

For me it’s Youtube, although the amateur mashups are irritating me lately

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By Mike Sheetal on Jul 21, 2008

We do an event here in Tokyo, http://ultrasupertube.com , where we DJ/VJ everything from Youtube. … it came out of many sessions playing Youtube clips at the end of the day in the office … great fun. Looking at exporting the concept if anyone is interested in doing it in Europe.

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By Kris Van den Bergh on Jul 21, 2008

I would say that the phenomenon you describe is what I call the YouTube generation. Actually, I follow a complete different way of finding (new) music. My online music base is Myspace, which has a huge music scene and band profiles often have songs online too, but also embedded videos. I use it in combination with Last.fm, for discovering new artists. Nonetheless I like YouTube. The concept of music channels is a great way to follow music video updates by your favorite band. In general, I wouldn’t use YouTube for listening plain songs. YouTube is for video.

Something completely different: I do not like listening to music in my web browser. If I dig an artist, I download an album and fire on Winamp. It feels more comfortable for the reason that I always tend to switch tabs while multi-tasking in Firefox. Therefore, I really prefer a standalone music player instead of crawling through the tab labyrinth.

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By Underdogg on Jul 21, 2008

I completely agree with Joop. Those aweful amateur mashups are a real pain in the ass! Although lately I use YouTube more & more, I really prefer Last.fm as music search engine. It’s not so much the social networking functionality that’s interesting, but more the possibility to discover new artists & songs thanks to the related music links. Mostly, I use YouTube in the same way as the 14 year old kid. Mimicking scratch moves & techniques from old skool legends & DMC championships just as I did in the old days with my VHS video tapes.

In my humble opinion, I think that the two biggest shares of YouTube search queries are those for music and tv/movie videos. And that the share of queries for music content is even a bit bigger then that for tv/movie stuff.

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By Patrick de Laive on Jul 21, 2008

Good stuff Robin. I’m using last.fm, muxtape, youtube and a new ‘under the radar’ music service (more on this one in about a month on The Next Web).

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By Remco on Jul 21, 2008

I agree YouTube is used for songs more and more these days. Teens are especially keen in using it. No wonder record companies are getting on the bandwagon and are making deals with YouTube.

I like using http://www.songerize.com for my music search and listen news. Maybe it’s and amateur mashup, but I like to see it as the Google of music. It’s quick, easy and does what it should do well!

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By Srega on Jul 22, 2008

I like using russian music search engine http://mp3shki.ru/ or http://mp3shki.com/

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By Alexis on Jul 22, 2008

Hi,
Video sharing is all the rage these days. We all want to share our videos, to share our passions and the things we like. There are so many sites around to publish our videos on the web that it is sometimes hard to make a choice. We know some of them like YouTube, Revver or Dailymotion, but there are so many others competing to be the number one, or targeting a specific audience, whether geographically (China, Japan, Turkey…), by language (German, Arabic, French…) or for the kind of content they enable to publish (cooking, planes, extreme sports…).
I have compiled a growing list of more than 750 video sharing sites, video search engines, and video download sites that you can check at http://www.ilikesharingvideos.com
For each of them, you will get useful information such as their history, the country from which most of their visitors come, their niche, their rank, their latest news…
This site offers some other interesting features, like a forum about online videos, how to make money with your videos, how to create your own YouTube site, etc.
So if you are interested in video sharing or online video marketing, give an eye to this site, it worths it.
Cheers

[Reply]
By AB on Jul 24, 2008

I think Muzu Tv are going to make waves is this area. There’s an incentive for the content owners and for the content consumers who are getting quality content thats not heaped in with anything that kinda might relate it to it through some random keyword.

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By John on Jul 24, 2008

If you could combine blinkx.tv technology for interegating videos for search, http://www.muzu.tv for the experience of getting everything in one place and completely focussed on music with the depth of content that youtube has then we’d be talking…..

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By Robin Wauters on Jul 24, 2008

AB ‘and’ John: ur doing astroturfing wrong!

You’re supposed to mask or change your IP address so the publisher can’t tell you’re the same person or at least from the same company. Just a tip :)

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By AB on Jul 24, 2008

Different people, I sent him the link ;-)

To share the same experience of talking to a music and internet savy teenager recently. He was mad about Lilly Allen but frustrated by all the fan generated stuff he had to wade through when he went to YouTube. YouTube is great for the video sharing masses but not the music niche.

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By GillieBean on Jul 25, 2008

All you budding guitar learners out there, haev you checked out the Tutorials channel on MUZU.tv? There are entire channels dedicated to teaching you how to play guitar. It’s pretty much on the money.

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By Logan on Nov 12, 2008

Songza.com is the way to go it uses youtube and imeem two of my favorites to find songs online. Works like a charm try it out.

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