YouTube is easily the biggest streaming music platform – by far – and it’s completely DRM-protected, just like Spotify, Pandora, and Grooveshark. The question is, do enough people want to circumvent these limitations, or are they happy with a self-contained, streaming-only experience?
So far, MP3 and MP4 download workarounds – mostly for YouTube – have had niche appeal. And it’s been that way for years. But whether that’s a function of consumer disinterest or simply untapped opportunity remains unclear. Maybe there’s a killer app lurking in this category, if that fateful combination of simplicity and virality strikes.
Enter clip.dj, a stupid-simple workaround for saving YouTube clips as MP3s or MP4s. Just like so many circumvention tools before it. But this one is downright simple-stupid to use, and it’s growing really, really fast.
Like others, the process is easy: clip.dj simply captures a YouTube video from its url (makes sense), though the user must go to YouTube first and fetch that url – instead of the process happening in one interface. Here’s the process involved in saving an MP4 of an interview we recently did with Datarock. This screenshot basically compresses a few steps: (a) entering the url after finding it on YouTube, (b) matching it to clip.dj and downloading, (c) finishing the MP4 (or MP3) download itself.
Maybe the real killer comes from a consolidated app experience, one that doesn’t involved tab-toggling and cutting-n-pasting. And honestly, this is still a scrappy space with players far bigger than Clip. But the scary question is whether that remains the status quo.
