No Need for YouTube without Videos

Over the last two weeks a new music search engine – Songza – has been generating some buzz in the blogosphere. People praised its user interface and the ease of finding and playing music. So being slow as usual, I have eventually decided to have a look at it as well.

The Interface is great

Actually the user interface is very slick and much thought has been put into the design and functionality. There is a simple search box to search for an artist or title. Results come in quickly and are listed below the box. When clicking on a title you will see the interface shown above. Well done! There are the usual links to embed the title, send it to a friend, rate it, and add it to a playlist. Those playlists are very fine examples of AJAX done right, by the way.

It’s just YouTube

Well, those are the plus points of Songza. There are negative ones, too. First, users cannot save playlists; well, actually that’s because you can’t create an account on Songza. So if you delete the cookie playlists are gone. The links to the discography of an artist and to purchasing the title are pretty much worthless. They link to Google Music Search and Google Checkout without showing relevant results.

So where are the music titles from? Well, quite simple: directly from YouTube. Yep, Songza makes use of the YouTube API. So essentially you’ll get music from YouTube without the videos. Funnily enough there is a link to watch the title on YouTube as well.

Conclusion

The user interface is simple, clean, and a pleasure to use. Many web applications could learn from it. However I can’t see why I should use Songza for playing some songs when I get the same service on YouTube. Songza looks like a prototype of an application that could be much more powerful. On the other hand Songza might as well be just a promotional application for other services by Humanized, the company behind it that is run by Aza Raskin, son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin.