Music Video Genome is an ambitious project to create a recommendations application for music videos. It’s in the early stages of development and needs help from the community to grow.
Created by Casey Pugh, the online service is building a database of music videos from sources like YouTube and Vimeo. Pugh is relying on the crowd to help him accurately match song names to online videos. This is harder than it sounds as many music videos are merely the song with the lyrics, not the actual video. Users are asked to flag these incorrect results, so the database can store only the correct matches.
It’s hard to know if this project will take off as it faces several stumbling blocks. The most notable issue is the curation of the video. Scraping YouTube may be fine in the beginning, but licensing of the video content from the music industry may become necessary at some point in the project. Hopefully, Pugh can navigate these rocky waters as the idea behind Music Video Genome is interesting. [Music Video Genome via Casey Pugh]