YouTube is announcing today that video publishers will now have more than 25,000 new songs to choose between for their video soundtracks. The songs are provided by independent music licensing firm Rumblefish and are available using YouTube's AudioSwap feature.
Rumblefish is a Portland, Oregon based company that provides music for film makers, marketing firms and others. Is it just a lot of elevator music? Searching through the company's own online catalog, MusicLicensingStore.com, our first impression was relatively positive. You can even search for well-known band names and get suggestions for similar sounding unknown groups.
]]> How It WorksAudioSwap was launched as an experimental feature in February of 2007, with a fairly limited selection of songs separated by genre. If YouTube gives AudioSwap more prominent placement on the site, we suspect this could be a very big hit. The feature replaces the entire audio track of a video with the selected tune, an approach that will admittedly suit some people better than others.
We hope that YouTube will add a search function similar to the one on the Rumblefish site; the project would get a lot more traction if users could search for big names in music and get recommendations of similar bands they haven't heard of before.
Music licensing is an active if complicated market online, with major labels doing deals over the past year with both YouTube and MySpace. Video publishers interested in getting off the beaten path of mainstream music and doing so legally at no cost to themselves could find the newly expanded AudioSwap of great interest.
Following on the heals of YouTube's Global Symphony project, the Rumblefish announcement is another example of how much room for innovation still exists in online video.
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