YouTube adds music discovery features

YouTube has lots of music content, but until now they haven't given music first class treatment. YouTube treated music videos the same way it treated a video of a skateboarding dog or the grape stomp lady. That just changed with the launch of the YouTube Music Discovery Project.

You can now type in the name of an artist or song and YouTube will build you a video playlist that includes the artist/song you searched for and similar artists/songs. It will also show you artist bios.

This is a welcome step in the right direction from YouTube. It is super simple to start using, it lets you save playlists and share them. Here's a playlist I made with music from The Sounds. It also seems to get the real song, unlike a typical YouTube search which is just as likely to give you someone singing a cover of a real song as the actual artist performing the song. Another nice touch is that you can search for new songs and edit the playlist while it is playing. That should make it a lot easier to use when you want to play music on YouTube without interruption.

Unlike Last.fm or Pandora, it doesn't look like you can train YouTube about your likes and dislikes. This works more like iTunes' Genius, where you give it a single value it and it gives you a list. It's recommender is all or nothing; there are no shades of gray.

Hopefully YouTube will keep improving the Music Discovery Project in the future.

What do you think? Does having videos add anything, or are they unnecessary? Is this something you will use?