Thankee TechCrunch for the pointer to the new YouTube Music Discover Project which lets you use YouTube to explore music videos and possibly pick up on some new artists.

Enter a music act on the front page. (If you can’t think of one YouTube will give you some suggestions.) YouTube will take your artist and make you a list of videos by that artist sprinkled with some hopefully-related artists.

I did a search for Flogging Molly. YouTube gave me the screen you see here, with a tab that has a list of Flogging Molly videos available on YouTube. There’s also a mixtape tab that has the video playlist that you see on the left side of the screen. (The videos start playing automatically when you get the results page.) Then there’s a related artists tab that opens up to other lists of songs. In the case of Flogging Molly, YouTube recommended ten related artists, only two of which I had heard of.

The playlists that the Music Discover Project generates can be saved or opened, or songs removed on the fly. The songs in the related artist tab can be dropped into the playlist as well.

The site took most of the artists I threw at it, though sometimes there were only a few videos available and no related artists. Sometimes I was a bit surprised by the related artists it turned up and sometimes it seemed spot-on (do a search for Michael Hedges.)

Just two complaints: if you want to do a new search, it looks like you have to reload the page to get rid of your old search. And when you’re looking at music videos in that fairly small area on the results screen, the Google ads are about three times as annoying. Good thing you can minimize ’em…