Do you like watching music videos? I sure do, but I’ve always felt something was missing. VEVO tells me that Facebook integration is the missing component in my music video obsessed life.
Writing on the VEVO blog, Jim Macnie says that VEVO is rolling out some changes that makes it more like the Pandora of music videos. The first new change comes from Facebook integration that looks at the music you have posted on your profile recently and compiles a list of music videos based on that. They are also using iTunes Match to scan your music library and compile a list based on that criteria. Finally and the most Pandora of them all, you can just search for a video and the site will compile a list of music videos that are similar to the artist you searched for.
That all sounds pretty awesome. Let’s see how it works in real time. I went to the Web site and signed up through Facebook. It says that it would pull music videos that I post to my Facebook wall and populate a playlist for me. As you can see, no such thing has happened.
Fair enough, VEVO, I have weird non-mainstream tastes in music. While I do enjoy the rhythmic guttural sounds of Ke$ha, I don’t normally post her music videos to my Facebook profile.
I don’t use iTunes for music so they’re already cutting out a potential customer right there. VEVO should implement foobar match so they can better provide me with their service.
With the first two options out of my control, it’s time to resort to the manual search tactic. Since I’ve already used Ke$ha as an example, let’s search for party rockers LMFAO. Upon searching for them, we’re left with a playlist composed of nothing but LMFAO videos. While this may appease some viewers, it doesn’t really leave much to variety.
If you want true variety, it looks like you’re going to have to stick to manually adding videos to a playlist. At this point, it almost seems like you’re better off sticking to Pandora or last.fm, unless you really want to watch a couple of men tell you how sexy they are all day.
One last thing to mention is that the Facebook integration will broadcast what video you’re watching to all of your friends. Thankfully, there’s a little switch at the top right that lets you turn off social sharing if you don’t want your friends to know that you’ve been watching Ke$ha music videos for the past three hours.
It’s important to remember that the new VEVO is in beta. A lot of these new features will be working on and off for the next couple of days (or weeks) until they get it all finalized. I may have just hit a rough patch today with my Ke$ha and LMFAO marathon.
The VEVO experience is not just limited to the Web site. It’s also available on iPhone, Android, Facebook and an Xbox 360 app. There’s also an iPad app coming soon.
Final verdict: if they add support for more than just iTunes, I can see this becoming pretty cool in the future. Until then, I’ll stick to foobar and posting non-VEVO artists to my Facebook page.
