Online video site Blinkx is branching out into music with the launch of Blinkx Music Beta, a search engine for online music videos. The front page is simple enough. You're greeted with a search box, a list of top artists, and the ability to click a letter to see results starting with A through Z. You can search for artists, albums, or songs.

Unfortunately, the search index is pretty sparse. There are a number of songs, artists, and albums that return no results. And the search engine's not that intelligent. While a search for Coldplay returns a fair number of results, searching for Cold Play or Caldplay results in a "no results matching your query" message. So you'd better not include a typo or not know the proper phrasing of your favorite band name. Heck, on a whim, I tried searching for Hootie and the Blowfish and got zero results, which normally wouldn't upset me in the least. But Hootie & The Blowfish actually did return results.

Blinkx doesn't host the videos on its own site. Instead, when you click on a song you'll be taken to the page where the video rests, whether it be on YouTube, Last.fm, or another site. A Blinkx toolbar hangs out at the top of the screen to take you back to where you started or let you begin another search.

A fairly large number of videos I did find were cellphone recordings shot at concerts rather than professional music videos.

That's the bad news. Here's the good news: the Blinkbox online video service keeps getting better. I got an email today letting me know that Blinkbox had added a number of BBC TV shows which are now available to watch for free including episodes from the first two seasons of the original (William Hartnell) Doctor Who as well as episodes of The Young Ones, Hustle, and The League of Gentlemen. Update: It's just been pointed out to me that Blinkbox (which I mistakenly referred to as Blinkxbox at first) is not actually related to Blinkx. I'm still excited about the BBC content though.

[via VentureBeat]

Last week "twitter for music" service Blip.fm announced that most of its music would be streaming from imeem. This week, the company added YouTube music videos, which not only greatly expands Blip.fm's music library, it also gives users a reason to hang out on the web site rather than using third party clients like Blipster. Well, a tleast until someone develops a good desktop client that will let you send and receive updates, listen to music, and watch videos.

You can now use Blip.fm as a sort of music video search engine, whether you want to share songs with friends or not. If you do want to let people know what you're watching or listening to, you can send messages with links to songs or videos with just a click. You can also link Blip.fm to your Twitter account so that your friends don't even need to be signed up for Blip.fm to know that you harbor a secret Def Leppard addiction.

[via GigaOm]

YouTube is already home to more music videos than probably any other site on the internet. But YouTube and Universal Music Group have announced plans to launch a new site, called Vevo, which will be dedicated exlusively to music videos.

Vevo will be an advertising supported site, and the goal is to generate more money from views of professionally produced music videos than music studios like Warner are currently getting from YouTube. The new site will be owned by Universal and will feature higher quality videos than those found on YouTube. Whether advertisers will be willing to pay higher rates, or computer users will actually bother to visit Vevo instead of YouTube remains to be seen.

Vevo is scheduled to launch within the next few months.

Muziic is one of the most interesting desktop media players I've seen in a long time. Too bad it probably won't last. The site looks a lot like your average iTunes/Winamp/Songbird style music player. It lets you create playlists, search your library, and browse by category.

But here's what sets Muziic apart from the crowd: The music isn't stored on your computer. The application's music library comes from YouTube. In fact, there's a tiny little video window that plays the music videos that go along with each song. You can click that window to open up the video in a larger window.

The developer behind Muziic says that since the audio is all coming from YouTube, where it's available to stream for free, that the program is free and legal. But that doesn't mean it's not a violation of YouTube's terms of service. The company pays music studios a royalty for the rights to stream music. And Muziic lets you listen to that music without being exposed to the ads on YouTube.com.

So it's probably just a matter of time before Google attempts to shut Muziic down... or maybe the company will attempt to purchase the application and keep it alive as an ad-supported utility.

[via ReadWriteWeb and CNet]

YouTube has been removing videos that violate copyright for a while. But now it looks like Google is taking a new approach toward some videos by removing only the audio tracks. I guess the idea is that some people upload fan-made videos featuring copyrighted music tracks. The company can leave the videos online while removing the music that was uploaded without the content owner's permission.

But it means that there are now a fair number of music videos as well as fan made videos on YouTube that are video-only. If you've ever wondered how well Seal's Kiss From a Rose video holds up without the actual song,now's your chance to find out. Or you can check out an alternate version of the video, also sans music.

Fortunately there's still music accompanying Rick Astley's dance moves.

The decision to remove just the music from the unofficially uploaded videos makes sense in the case of fan made movies. But for music videos, it seems like an odd move, since the music studios own the rights to the video and not just the music.

[via Mashable]

MiniTube is a plugin for WinAmp that attempts to find music videos from YouTube for every song in your playlist. Here's how it's supposed to work: A song starts to play, and MiniTube will automatically find the best music video available for the song and start playing it. That's the theory anyway. But the actual practice is a bit shakier.

That's because MiniTube just grabs the first video it can find that roughly matches the song's metadata. That means there's a pretty decent chance you'll get the wrong video from the right artist, a video of an amateur musicians performing the correct song, or something else entirely. Sometimes MiniTube will find the right video, but if the metadata on your MP3s is anything less than perfect, more often than not, it won't.

MiniTube does address one potential problem fairly well. Because the audio of the YouTube video will undoubtedly be out of synch with the audio file, you can choose to either play your audio file and mute the audio on the video, or mute Winamp and play the audio and video from the YouTube video.

[via gHacks]

MTV launched a new music video hub today at MTVMusic.com. And it looks remarkably like online video site Hulu. Except instead of hosting hundreds of movies and TV shows, the site hosts thousands of music videos.

The site has a nice mix of new and older videos. You can watch videos on the site or embed them on another web page. And you can watch in full screen.

There's also a handy "similar artists" feature that will let you know that if you like Tori Amos you might want to look for videos from Fiona Apple. But the recommendation engine is far from perfect. For example, when you click on the page for Mike Doughty, you'll discover that Jack Johnson is a similar artist, but there's no link to the 5 music videos from Soul Coughing, the band Mike Doughty used to perform with.

The biggest challenge MTV Music faces is the fact that there are dozens, if not hundreds of places to find the exact same content on the internet, and then some. You can find a much wider selection of music videos on YouTube or dozens of other online video sites than you can on MTV Music. It's true that some of those videos may not have been uploaded legally, but they're out there.

So while Hulu is one of the few places you can go for free, legal, and full length TV episodes, MTV Music is jsut the latest music video portal to hit the web. And while the web page is new, it's not like MTV hasn't had hundreds of music videos on its website for years.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

We'll let you in on a little secret: There are a ton of music videos and live performances on YouTube. What? You knew that? Well, then you also probably know how hard it can be to find every song on an album and play it in order. YouTube is really designed for searching for videos one at a time. But Jogli helps organize the mess.

Jogli is basically a search engine and music video player. Search for an artist and Jogli will bring up a list of possible results. Click an artist name and you'll find a list of albums. Click an album and you'll be presented with a list of songs. In many cases not each song is clickable, but many are.

When you hit the play button, a YouTube video will start playing in the corner. But you can also queue up additional songs and even search for new songs without stopping your recording. Jogli is a lot like MyStrands, another site we covered earlier this year. But the way Jogli organizes songs by artist and album sets it apart from the competition.

Thanks Chen!

There are plenty of music videos on popular video sharing sites like YouTube. Some of them were even uploaded by content owners who had the rights to the videos. But many aren't, and there's always a chance that music video you bookmarked yesterday could be pulled down tomorrow.

PluggedIn is a new music video site that doesn't have that problem because are all posted with the cooperation of 3 of the 4 major music studios: Universal, Sony BMG, and EMI. Warner hasn't signed on yet, but it could in the future. The site has about 10,000 videos and they're all high quality, with many available in HD video.

The biggest problem we have with the site is that like with most other 100% legal music sources, there's a good chance you won't be able to find what you're looking for. If you're looking for videos from Ashanti, Akon, or Nine Inch Nails, PluggedIn's got you covered. Mike Doughty or Tori Amos, not so much (although there is a Tom Jones video featuring Tori Amos on backing vocals available).

The service does have profile page for a ton of musicians, including artists with no videos available on the site. Users can view photos, read information about the artist, or purchase albums from Amazon. Users can also treat PluggedIn as a social networking site by creating profiles, marking favorite videos, and finding others with similar musical tastes.

[via VentureBeat]

NetworkWorld has put together a collection of songs about Google. For the most part, they're not particularly good. But most are somewhat funny, whether they were supposed to be or not. And in case you were wondering, here are a few words that (sort of) rhyme with Google:

• Poodle
• Strudle
• Fuedel
• Noodle
• Caboodle

OK, we acknowledge, most of those words don't actually rhyme with Google. But set to music... they still don't really rhyme. Fortunately, just the first two on this list actually show up in any of the music videos.

[via InsideGoogle]

MyStrands.tv is sort of like Pandora or Last.fm for music videos. All you do is enter an artist or genre and MyStrands will start playing music videos it thinks you'll like. What makes MyStrands different from those other services is that MyStrands content comes entirely from YouTube.

As such, it's not clear whether all of the videos are 100% legal. In fact, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that some of the content has been ilegally uploaded by users, but after playing around with MyStrands for a while we have yet to get an error message telling us a video has been removed, so hopefully there's a system in place to skip over removed videos.

As with similar music discovery services, you can give music videos a thumbs up or down to let MyStrands more easily find music that meets your tastes. If you sign up for an account you can save and share your custom channels.

[via SolSie]

Online music community site FIQL is launching a new service today called FIQL TV. While FIQL has been around since 2005, its business model has sort of limited growth. The service lets you create and import music playlists. You can share those playlists with other users. There's just one problem: it was kind of a hassle for anyone to actually use those playlists to listen to music.

The site doesn't host music, and for the most part you can't find free streaming music online, so you needed to link out to services like Napster or Rhapsody if you wanted to listen to the songs.

Now here's the funny part. While it's relatively tricky to find free streaming music online, it's really easy to find free streaming music videos. Just go to YouTube. Or Metacafe. Or DailyMotion or any of the other myriad online video sites that lets users upload clips of their cat doing stupid things, or music videos they've recorded from MTV. Sure, it's illegal to upload a video if you don't own the copyrights, but that hasn't stopped people from doing it. Constantly.

So FIQL TV will take your FIQL playlists and locate corresponding music videos. It's kind of like creating your own MTV. You can also skip ahead or back in the playlist. And there's an embeddable player so you can add your playlist to your own website.

Odds are some of the videos you want to see won't be available, or will be removed by YouTube for copyright violations. But there's an equally good chance some other user will upload the same video. Oh yeah, and sometimes content producers actually put their videos on YouTube on purpose.

Still, basing your business model on the illegal activity of the folks who use another site is a bit tricky. So we're going to say the outlook for FIQL's future is, well... fickle.

FIQL is down for site maintenance right now, but FIQL TV should be up and running later today.

[via TechCrunch]