A teenager and his father have invented a computer program that allows users to listen to YouTube’s collection of music videos as if it were a private collection of music. The “Muziic software” program, created by 15-year-old David Nelson and his father Mark, allows users to search the YouTube video database and create playlists of songs completely free.
“The Muziic player is a pretty cool little thing,” Matt Rosoff from analyst firm Directions on Microsoft told The Age.
“It looks and works a lot like iTunes in that it is a downloadable desktop application; but you get all the content from YouTube. You have an all-in-one-place library of music for free.”
Google has been struggling to monetise the site after its $US1.65 billion purchase in 2006, and its attempts may be hurt by the new program. Google is currently checking whether Muziic is in breach of YouTube terms of service.
“Hopefully, they will work something out,” Rosoff said. “Muziic is analogous to a subscription music service, but it’s free.”
Meanwhile, the site has attracted massive amounts of traffic, with servers crashing for an hour last week. “We served thousands of downloads of the Muziic player and encoder in just a few hours!” the company blog said.
“We’ve expected and anticipated extreme growth in our website and application … However, within less than a week of our ‘unofficial’ launch, we have been – over abundantly – blessed with huge amounts of traffic!”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
