YouTube.com/music is your ever-changing guide to music

YouTube has videos across the entire spectrum of music, from current pop hits to classic tracks to obscure but wonderful sounds. But how do you find that next piece of musical gold? To help with this task we’re re-launching our YouTube Music page with a host of new features to help guide you on your audio-visual quest, and several guest curators to help out as well.

On YouTube.com/music you can now find:

• recommended videos and artists based on the music videos you’re watching


• local concert listings in your area paired with artist videos


• the YouTube Top 100 - your invaluable source to the most popular music based on what the community is viewing

To help you get more into music on YouTube we’ve also partnered with music experts and tastemakers to provide you with daily playlists and picks. In the coming weeks you’ll be able to check out curations from SPIN, Vice, XLR8R and more. Some of YouTube’s music vloggers will also find a new home on the page, like the “Internet’s busiest music nerd,” Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop.

Finally, you may have noticed the electric guitar adorning the YouTube logo today. It’s there today to celebrate the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Guide to Rock, who have the first hand-picked playlist on the new music page. Over the next five days some of your favorite music stars will be sharing a personal guide to their genre, including David Guetta’s Guide to Electronica on Friday, Lady Gaga’s Guide to Pop on Saturday and Eminem & Royce Da 5’9”’s Guide to Hiphop on Monday. Look out for a new music-based YouTube logo each day, and clicking on it will bring you straight to the music page.

Tim Partridge, Music Marketing Manager recently watched “Check out the new youtube.com/music.”

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Auto-Captions now available in Japanese

Cross Posted from the YouTube Japan Blog.

Last March we offered everyone the ability to automatically create captions on your videos, and the response has been exciting to see: auto-captions have been generated on nearly 40 million videos, and the number of manually-created caption tracks has more than tripled. We’re eager to see more videos captioned in more languages, so we just rolled out this feature to a new language — Japanese.

Now on any video with a clear Japanese speech track, a red “CC” button will appear at the bottom of the player, where you can click it to generate automatic captions from the speech. We’re also working closely with the the Japan Federation for the Deaf to improve this technology and make it more useful.

Here’s an example of how it works from our partner ANN News Channel:



And if you really want to get multilingual with YouTube videos, when these auto-captions are combined with our auto-translate feature, you’ll be able to generate subtitles into more than 50 languages.

Keeping up with our Japanese partners just got that much easier.

Brad Ellis, Product Manager, YouTube Japan, recently watched “手話あいらんど手話教室入門コース.”

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The next step in embedded videos: HD preview images and a logoless option

It may be hard to imagine, but YouTube’s video preview images represent to many the ultimate deciding factor as to whether or not to watch a video. If a preview image looks interesting, it can mean the difference between someone pressing the play button. In addition, your site and the videos on it represent to you polished masterpieces. Yet, your videos’ preview images can appear lower in quality, and sometimes you don't want a logo in your player. So today we're rolling out new features for both situations: HD preview images and the option to remove the logo from your player.

HD preview images

Video resolutions have been increasing across YouTube, and the sizes of your embedded players are bigger than ever. But until now, video preview images in today’s larger players (e.g. the image that appears before you click “Play”) haven’t kept up with your high-quality and larger videos.

Any new video uploaded to the site in a resolution of 480p or higher will have an HD preview image wherever the player is embedded. The difference is even more striking with larger embeds (which don’t fit on this blog), so try it out yourself and see what we’re talking about. Here’s an example:

Before:


Now:


We’ll also automatically give HD preview images to older videos in the next few weeks, as long as they’re 480p or larger. A note for partners, if you’ve uploaded a custom preview image for your video, you’ll need to re-upload a new one for your videos in order to upgrade it to HD (1920 x 1080px, 2MB max).

Logoless player
Many of you have asked us for a version of the YouTube player without a YouTube logo, so the video plays without any branding nearby. We’ve now added a simple option to do it. At the end of the video URL in your embed code, just add the code ?modestbranding=1 and the player will show without the YouTube logo in the control bar. Note that a small “YouTube” text label will still show up in the upper-right corner of a paused video when you hover over the player. We’ve published the full list of the player’s possible parameters, and here’s an example:



We hope these features help you show your videos the way you want them to be seen.

Kevin Wilson, Software Engineer, recently watched "I'm Yours (ukulele)” and Ravi Kanodia, Software Engineer, recently watched “Candy BBQ - Epic Meal Time.”

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