Good idea using Spotify to get metadata. I did something similar a few years ago, mine was a bit different in that instead of searching for a specific artist you get different channels you can watch, similar to MTV. One of the issues I had then was that you don't just get the official videos in results for popular songs [0], how do you solve that?
I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns.
For more obscure artists/songs or for those with generic names, YouFM might play the wrong video if Youtube returns the wrong result. I'm not sure if there's any way to fix it except crowd-sourced curation.
> I don't. I simply play the first result that youtube returns.
I had thought of a similar idea to what this website does (using song metadata from a cleaned source like Spotify and then play the song through YouTube).
The way I'd imagined doing the song to YouTube mapping was through crowdsourcing - you could rank the YouTube results for each song based on number of listens and votes on your website. By default you would play the top ranked video for a song, but allow users to see alternate video links (probably hidden behind menus) and play those instead if they want (or if they have accounts, you could allow users to individually mark a video as being their preference for a particular song, etc.), probably also incorporating these plays into your ranking. You could also use crowdsourcing for further metadata about the video - e.g., some music videos have long intros/outros that you wouldn't necessarily want to hear when you're just listening to music, so you could allow people to submit and vote on start/end times for the 'song' part of the music video.
Anyway, I really like the interface! It's much cleaner than any other attempt at this I've seen.
Edit: I missed your mention of crowdsourcing at the end of your post, whoops - sounds like you've probably already thought of most/all the ideas in this post :)
Yes, I did consider making the exact process you described for videos. Held off on it to launch earlier. Maybe in the next version I'll finally add this.
I'm primarily a designer (just learning to code php and ruby) so I'm happy that you liked the interface.
