YouTube adds iTunes tagging
By Ronald O Carlson
You’re at work and you’ve been slumming YouTube (using Safari’s private browsing of course) all afternoon when you hear it. It’s the song, the one that’s been clouding your thoughts like the scent of Chinese take out or the stink of cheap perfume. What is it and, more importantly, ‘Can I has it?’
The YouTube Team has heard your muffled cries (for users in the US) and for a limited number of videos, the ability to purchase music heard on the industry-leading social networking site has arrived.
Today, we’re taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding “click-to-buy” links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features.
So, what are the lucky online music stores benefiting from YouTube’s largess? The iTunes Music Store (over 70% worldwide market share) and Apple’s closest competitor in the digital music download space, AmazonMP3 (9% share of the US market only), share the honors.
The example link in the team’s blogpost is for Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl, which I guess someone likes.
Both stores offer it in sterling 256K quality and, yes, Amazon’s schlepping it for 10¢ less than iTunes (99¢). Still though, I’d rather give Apple the dime just to have the file right where it belongs—in iTunes—with no further monkeying around and one less zombie file to deal with.
Luvs my Mac. iPhone? Not so much
Whereas Amazon and the iTunes Store also share online music retail honors on Last.fm, Apple owns a click-to-buy monopoly on both Pandora and AOLRadio.
To date, Last.fm, Pandora and AOLRadio all offer Mac and iPhone / touch clients. Though you can watch grainy YouTube vids on your iPhone, you can’t yet “click to buy.” Our loss…
What’s your take?
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Stumble It!

October 12th, 2008
I wouldn’t give money to Steve Jobs if I can help it, not even 99 cents…
Why? for his DRM hypocrisy, and for his ugly thumb on which iPhone apps I can buy and which I can’t…
I’ll even suffer through Windows Mobile on the Xperia 1, to avoid apple and its crappy iPhone hardware, like that excuse of a camera, no video recording, non exchangable battery, no copy and paste and ridiculous forced phone plans, etc etc…
October 21st, 2008
If you are interested in “iTune-type Tagging” songs that you hear on the radio but don’t exactly want to give money to Steve Jobs….You can TAG on RadioTAGr.com and buy songs (if you care to on amazonmp3.com) amazonmp3.com is superior…. I say if you care to simply because RadioTAGr.com is designed more to just tell you what is playing on the radio (-: and TAGing is a nice feature we added plus lyrics look up and share with a friend. Enjoy - HL DeVore CEO/Founder, RadioTAGr
October 21st, 2008
If you are interested in “iTune-type Tagging” songs that you hear on the radio but don’t exactly want to give money to Steve Jobs….You can TAG on RadioTAGr.com and buy songs (if you care to on amazonmp3.com)
October 21st, 2008
amazonmp3.com is superior…. I say if you care to simply because RadioTAGr.com is designed more to just tell you what is playing on the radio (-: and TAGing is a nice feature we added plus lyrics look up and share with a friend. Enjoy - HL DeVore CEO/Founder, RadioTAGr