As of last Friday, HipHop, a free music streaming service with more than 45 million songs, is now available. Its secret is to get all the music from YouTube by extracting just the audio of the song, with the whole process happening behind the scenes for the user. You can play music and create playlists from the program with no registration and no time limits.
The structure of the program is as simple as it is effective. From the search bar up top you’ll type in the name of the artist or song you want to hear, and a list will appear almost immediately. Clicking on one of them will make it start to play instantly.
The only organization option available is to create named playlists. If you want to add a song to the list, you’ll just right-click on it and tick the context option that appears.
The internal operation of the program is very odd. First it takes your search term and compares it with the iTunes database to get the cover, title, and artist in question. With these details, it searches YouTube using its API for the first result that matches all the fields and streams the audio from the video. No trace of P2P in the process.
You’ll notice that it shares many structural similarities with PopCorn Time, the film and series streaming site through bittorrent, although as we’ve seen, the internal operation of each is completely different. What’s clear is that these programs should help other legal paid services offer their content with more features.
