Services that make use of the vast video and audio archive that is Youtube are springing out of the ground more recently in this year. YouScrobble is the latest service that is combining Youtubes video archive with the information provided by the music service Last.fm. This combination alone proves to be very effective. Users who visit Youtube can perform searches for music that they would like to listen to but the music (in form of videos) is usually unsorted and often unrelated to the artist (think cover versions for example). Last.fm on the other hand provides extensive information about artists, their albums and songs but playback is limited on the website.
YouScrobble brings the best of these two worlds together. Users who visit the music service can perform a search for an artist to be presented with the complete discography of that artist. The mashup now brings Youtube into the picture by allowing playback and downloads of the music found on Youtube.
The service makes use of three different user roles: Guests can search for and listen to music on the website. They are also allowed to download five songs every 24 hours. Registered users (still free) get ten additional downloads per day, a better download priority, playlist support and scrobble functionality to let Last.fm know about the music. Paid users finally get unlimited downloads and the highest priority in the download queue.
YouScrobble offers means to discover music in a different way. Users can also take a look at the categories or popular artists instead of searching for artists, albums, bands or songs.
Is the service legal? That’s a question that is better left to the lawyers in this case. The pay for downloads model that YouScrobble uses is certainly the most controversial aspect of the service. As Martin Bryant over at Read Write Web points out it is one thing to embed videos on a website that playback music and another to offer that music for download. But that’s something that the developer’s have to dell with eventually, not the users who are using the service.
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You’re better off using http://www.TubeRadio.fm (but we’re biased!)
Seriously, illegal or not, what they do is against YouTube T&Cs.