YouTube's 'Muziic' Hits Web

Muziic is simply an iTunes-like interface that draws on YouTube for music content rather than licensing from the labels and publishers. But unlike most services that use YouTube as its content source, Muziic strips out the video to deliver only the audio stream instead.

Such disaggregation of the audio from the video has been a point of contention by the music industry in the past, particularly over concerns that any ads included in the music video — either around the video on YouTube’s site or embedded as an overlay in the video itself — would get lost, meaning labels/publishers/artists would not get paid for the streams.

Muziic attempts to get around this by repurposing these ads in a small window in its player, but the image is far smaller than what would otherwise be seen on YouTube, and...