Seevl Adds Biography, Suggestions To YouTube Music Videos

If you are using YouTube for music discovery and searches, you know that the video hosting site is excellent for these kinds of things thanks to its large repository of music videos. What's not so great are many of the descriptions and information posted underneath the videos. If you are lucky, you get a video title that gives you the artist's name and the song title, and maybe even a one liner in the description with additional information. But if you want more information about an artist or song, you need to fire up a search engine to do just that, as most videos do not display information about artists at all.

The Google Chrome extension Seevl changes this, at least for well known artists. The extension adds information about the artist and suggestions to the sidebar on YouTube, effectively pushing the related video tracks that would otherwise be displayed in first place in the sidebar down.

The information are divided into three different sections of which only one is visible at a time. Biography displays information about the artist or band, taken from both the Seevi database and third party sources such as Wikipedia.

Fact-Sheet on the other hand gives you in depth information about the band members, genres, labels, collaborations, origin and activity. The information provided are great, as they link to searches on YouTube that provide you with music videos that match the selection.

Some of the options include:

• See a list of all music videos available on YouTube sorted by band the artist played in
• Display music from a specific record label that signed the artist or band
• Check out collaborations with other bands and artists
• Check out more bands from the band's location

The searches open on top of the active YouTube page, without reloads, which means that you can continue listening to the song you are listening to.

Pro Tip: Video links open in the same tab. Use a middle-click instead to open them in a new window to prevent that from happening.

Suggestions finally display related artists and bands that you may be interested in.

The extension adds a search link to the YouTube header which you can also use to find artists and new music and such. It displays a number of search types, e.g. artist, band member, label or death place that you can use to find specific music on YouTube. You can even combine searches, for instance genre and location to find local bands, or year and label to display all releases of a music record label.

Closing words

Seevl is awesome. Really. It is excellent to find new and related music videos on YouTube,  and additional information about a band or artist. The only downside is that you will encounter artists on YouTube that it does not have any information for. The other thing that may need some fixing is that the search menu displays the search tag listing only once, and then again when you reload the page.

Update: The Seevl extension is no longer available. The company that created it has developed a similar -- but not identical -- extension. You can download Seevl free YouTube music discovery from the Chrome Web Store. We have removed the link that pointed to the pulled extension.

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