TubeRadio helps you discover great music on YouTube

YouTube's a great source of music, including live shows and bootleg recordings that are hard to find anywhere else, and application developers are taking advantage of YouTube's relative openness to help users find and organize that music in new ways.

Last month, London-based start-up TubeRadio.fm launched a Web application that lets you search YouTube, organize the content into playlists, and share those playlists with friends via an e-mail link, Twitter post, or Facebook profile update. If you go through the free registration, you'll be able to save playlists as well. The concept is very similar to that of Muziic, but without any software to download and install--this is strictly a Web application, like Grooveshark.

TubeRadio.fm offers an iTunes-like interface on top of music content from YouTube.

TubeRadio has a few interesting wrinkles that make it worth checking out. If you select the "Discography" tab, then search on an artist's name, it will return a list of that artist's albums. Select any album, and it will cobble together a streaming playlist of songs from the album in in the proper order--not all of the songs will be the original studio versions, but might be lower-quality live or bootleg recordings. It all depends on what YouTube has available.

For each album, TubeRadio also provides links to buy the physical CD from Amazon, or MP3 downloads from 7digital.

When a song is playing, a window at the bottom of the screen contains tabs with information such as lyrics (this doesn't work all the time, but seems reliable for studio-based recordings), plus an artist biography, discography, and suggestions for other albums you might like (the last three features are provided by Last.fm, which is owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive).

All in all, it's a slick and convenient way to discover the great wealth of music available on YouTube, and it doesn't cost a dime.

[NewMediaMonkey]

Thanks for sharing. Looks very promising.

[QuetzalcoatlUSA]

I wonder how Apple feels about having the iTunes GUI ripped off.

[AndrewRich]

Except that recently (or at least within the last several months), the audio tracks for all YouTube music videos were downgraded to 64kbps or less. Makes it really quite pointless.

[CyberShepherd]

Thanks for suggesting this. At least you can have the opportunity to listen more fully to recordings before you buy with the Discography capability.

However, I noticed on the Releases section of the page a request to - "Pretty please help TubeRadio out, Digg this: http://bit.ly/oKXAW". What is the significance of bit.ly, which is an Iranian website?

[CyberShepherd]

Guess I was wrong. .ly appears to be the domain extension for Lybia.

According to Google:
bit.ly, a simple url shortener
Offers URL redirection service with real-time link tracking.