YouScrobble, the mashup of Last.fm and YouTube, is completely against the law and completely genius. The site is a great platform to find new artists and the concept is simple. YouScrobble basically extracts the audio from YouTube videos and allows users to download the song, in addition to seeing its visual component. The main page displays a live feed of songs that have recently been listened to and features the most listened to artists on their website. When a user searches for a band or a song, an organized and easy to read result page comes up. If the user then clicks a specific choice, not only can they watch the YouTube video and download the song, but they can read an artist bio and see a list of similar tracks and artists (this is the Last.fm component to the site). This guy complains that you could download a song with crappy song quality. The few songs I searched for generated videos with good audio quality. I even downloaded a song (go ahead and sue me RIAA) with excellent sound quality, which I find most YouTube music videos have anyways.
What is so great about YouScrobble is that it takes flaws of both YouTube and Last.fm and improves upon most of them. While you can find almost any song to listen to on YouTube, you can’t download them and the page for each video is often unorganized and has a lot of irrelevant information in regards to the actual contents of the video clip. Last.fm provides artist biography’s and other information on each musicians website, but often all songs are not offered for a free download.
YouScrobble has essentially taken on the mentality that most people steal their music anyways, so why not give them a legitimate platform to do so?
Here’s the YouTube video for the song I downloaded by a duo named Wallpaper. While it has great sound quality, it only cost the group $11.82 to produce this music video.
