YouTube’s Music Discovery Project is a great new tool that produces playlists of music videos. Enter a name, and you get back a playlist of videos by that artist, a list of related artists, and a “mix tape” of videos of your artist and similar performers. You can deselect any videos you don’t like, and save the playlist to your YouTube account.
The examples on the YouTube page are people like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift and the Black-Eyed Peas, but I’ve found it works just as well with the real oldies like Cab Calloway, Jack Teagarden and Kate Smith.
There are a lot of music recommendation services and personalized internet radio services out there which may have more features, but I like the speed and simplicity of YouTube’s service, along with the video content that’s available here, especially for the old stuff. None of the recommendation services are perfect, but I like using them even if I disagree with a lot of the selections. This can be a good way to find new artists — or in my case, new OLD artists.
Here’s a screenshot of the Mix Tape page for Jack Teagarden. You can click on this to see a larger image, or better yet, just go to YouTube and try this yourself! You don’t need to have a YouTube account to try this, only to save the playlist.
- Music Discovery Project — Direct link to this YouTube service
- Jack Teagarden and Friends — My video mix playlist of Jack Teagarden and similar artists
- YouTube Music Discovery — Post from the unofficial Google Operating System blog
- YouTube Launches Music Discovery Project “Disco” — Post from RollingStone
