A 15-year-old programming whiz from Iowa and his father have created the world's first YouTube music player, mining the site's extensive library of music videos free of charge.

David Nelson and his father, Mark, spent a year developing Muziic Player, a free downloadable player that allows users to organise, search, stream and create playlists from YouTube's catalogue of music clips. Since its worldwide launch last month, the player has been downloaded more than a million times, forcing them to add another server to handle the incoming requests for the player.

"My dad had the idea for creating a YouTube music site, but I said it should be done in a media player format," David said. "I imagined how great it would be to open up your desktop media player and have a library of millions of music videos."

After giving it some thought, David realised its implementation was a definite possibility. "YouTube has a massive collection of user-generated music content, and holds contracts with the world's largest record labels that are compensated for the playback of supported media. It has undeniably the most extensive media library on the Internet."

Muziic Player looks and works like iTunes, taking advantage of the content ID software built into YouTube to detect video submissions not supported by YouTube's contracts for removal. This also allows for compensation of artists and record labels that do hold contracts with YouTube. Unfortunately for UK users, YouTube's withdrawal of music videos from the UK site after a failure to reach a new licensing agreement with the Performing Right Society also applies to the Muziic Player, meaning users from the UK may be unable to view certain content with the player.

But David believes his software has the ability to redefine the problems facing digital music. "Muziic fills a demand by streamlining this process and making it a whole lot easier to discover new artists and songs by using YouTube. It reinforces the idea that when done right, free, ad-supported music sharing websites and applications can provide artists and labels with full compensation and prove to be a profitable business for those streaming the content as well."

But is the Muziic Player a profitable business? Although YouTube's API does not serve advertisements through the YouTube embeddable player used by Muziic, the player makes money through ads on the Muziic.com website.