Search, Click Play, Hear Music

Yahoo! Search now offers full song playback directly from the Search results page for thousands of popular artists and songs.

In conjunction with Yahoo! Music’s new partnership with Rhapsody, we are pleased to announce the recent rollout of several improvements to Yahoo! Search’s music artist “WOW” shortcut originally launched in the Fall of 2007.

Now, in addition to gaining access to all of the artist background that you could before, you can also play up to 25 full songs a month, as opposed to the 30-second samples from before. And, by tapping into the vast catalog of songs available on Rhapsody, we’ve expanded the number of audio files that are available for playback and increased the number of tracks in the shortcut from three songs to four. If you want to look over a greater list of songs, you can now link directly to Yahoo! Music right from the shortcuts; full song playback will soon be enabled in Yahoo! Music as well, so stay tuned.

Yahoo! Search is using the FoxyPlayer (formerly known as the Yahoo! Media Player) to power the new Search experience. The player is easy-to-use, offers full functionality for song playback, and includes an expandable playlist tab. Users can continue browsing the results page while the player is in use, as search results will continue to scroll while the player stays in place near the bottom of the browser window. The player can be turned off at any time with a single click, or by simply navigating away from the Search results page. Try it out with a few of my favorites or go to Yahoo! Search and search for your own.

Pink Floyd
Johnny Cash
The Mars Volta

There’s no need to sign in to get your 25 full length streams. Just click a play button and the full length track will start playing. If you listen to all 25 songs before your 30 day period is up, you’ll hear 30 second samples until 30 days have passed from the time you first clicked play. If you are already a Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, you can listen to an unlimited number of songs through the FoxyPlayer. Just click the “powered by Rhapsody” logo in the player and click the link to sign in on the next page.

We at Yahoo! Music are pleased to have helped Yahoo! Search become the first major Search engine to offer full-song playback directly from the Search results page. We are confident our users will appreciate the enhancements we’ve made to the FoxyPlayer and music artist WOW shortcuts. Keep an eye out for more Rhapsody-related releases down the road, as we are planning several additional updates to showcase even more of Rhapsody’s deep music catalog in the near future.

For more information on our partnership with Rhapsody and how the FoxyPlayer works with Yahoo! Search, check out our help page.

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! Music

Are you awesome? Do you like music?

Are you excited about Music? Do you enjoy creating great experiences for users to enjoy?  If so, you have the opportunity to be part of the team that builds the top Music site on the internet. Email your resume to ymusic-jobs@yahoo-inc.com.

We are building Music applications such as Music Video, Internet Radio, Music Blogs, Yahoo Media Player and several other exciting applications. We’re hiring for a few positions that go a little something like this:

• Build cutting edge applications and mashups to entertain millions of users
• Develop scalable applications that services up to thousands of requests per second
• Review wireframes, design treatments and business requirements.
• Participate in design and code reviews, documentation of design, implementation of methodologies to ensure high quality software
• Utilize software engineering best practices such as source control, unit testing and continuous integration

The roles are within our Media Applications Group, working on web applications that power music experiences both on and off the Yahoo! Music site.

Continue reading Are you awesome? Do you like music?…

Yahoo! Music expands in Latin America

With summer knocking at the door, some may dream of being on an exotic beach, drinking mojitos and dancing to some Latin beats. That’s what I’m thinking of now.

If you’re sharing the same mood, now is your chance to check some Fiesta party tunes on the brand new Yahoo! Música México, the first Yahoo! Music site launched in Latin America.

Bursting with great local content, it features a partnership with MTV in a program called Blog & Rock. Users are invited to tell their stories, and the best one will be performed by a Mexican rockstar and may become the next big hit in the Latin world. How do you like that?

Yahoo! Música México has joined our worldwide music network bringing Yahoo! Music International up to 14 sites. If you feel like experiencing some global sounds, there are many ways you can enjoy and entertain yourself. Explore one of the Yahoo! Music sites in the Americas (Canada, US in Espanol, Mexico), Europe (UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy) or Asia Pacific (Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, China, Australia).
Wondering if Enrique Iglesias is still the number one in Spain? Check their Top 100 Charts. What about the latest music trends in Taiwan… awesome! Looking for more familiar tunes? Dive into some Transcanadian music.

Yahoo! Music embraces thousands of artists and genres worldwide and serves a music community of 60 million users every month. We’ll be launching some more new international sites later this year so stay tuned for more global news, and in the meantime enjoy those worldwide beats.

ciao,

Nicola Ghezzi
Yahoo! Music

Introducing the Yahoo! Music API

If you are a developer and have ever wished to bring the Yahoo! Music experience into your site, now you can do it. Today Yahoo! have made available to the public the new Yahoo! Music API.

The Yahoo! Music API give developers and publishers open access to one of the most complete music catalog online. You can now access and browse Yahoo! Music’s vast content of high quality videos, artists and albums through charts, search, recommendations, and more.

Is music video the missing part that your audience is looking for? Here’s an example of application that you could build:

That’s a great way to captivate your users through the video playback and video stations included with the embedded player.

Integrating Yahoo! Music’s content into your site is now a simple task. Here are some basic steps to get started.

Enjoy!

Nicola Ghezzi
Yahoo! Music

Music Videos - Gettin’ Better All the Time

Over the past several months we have rolled out a number of enhancements to our music video service.

As many of you already know, we took a big step in March by moving from a pop-up video player to an embedded player. This new experience provides for more seamless playback and improved sharing features.

We’ve also introduced some other cool features and enhancements that I’d like to share with you.

Upgraded video quality:
We recently upgraded our encoding specifications and are now providing 16×9 format videos when available. These new settings look fantastic and scale very well for the ‘full screen’ mode. Here’s a capture of a new 16×9 video from the band Paramore.

Video stations:
We have a comprehensive offering of over 50 video stations that give users a one-click option to launch great laid back video experiences. These stations are editorially programmed in the same manner as their radio counterparts and include everything from Today’s Big Hits to Chill Out to 2008 Grammy Nominees. If users are more interested in new discoveries, they can easily browse all video titles in each of these stations and sort by most popular, alphabetically by artist, or by newest. We continue to offer the standard browsing menu including My Station, Top 100, New Videos, Recommended, Videos I’ve Rated, and Video Premieres.

Sharing:
The new share panel in the player enables users to easily send a link of the video, share via IM or email, or embed.

Playlists:
With the new embedded video experience, we introduced the ability for users to add videos to playlists without interrupting viewing. To date, our users have created millions of video playlists!

Catalog:
We remain focused on building the most comprehensive and highest quality music video catalog on the web as well as providing accurate data and category tags for every video in the catalog. Want to see more videos in the same category as the video you are currently watching? Simply click on any of the category links and they will take you to a page with all the videos in that category. It’s a very useful discovery tool.

Enjoy, and let us know what new music video features you want to see. More updates to come!

Thanks,

Steve C.
Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music Unlimited Subscribers can now transfer to Rhapsody

For the past few months, we have been working closely with our friends at Rhapsody to bring Yahoo! Music users some great new features powered by Rhapsody’s critically acclaimed digital music service. I’m proud to announce that we are now able to bring the full Rhapsody subscription experience to our Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers. Subscribers can now transfer their Yahoo! Music Unlimited accounts, libraries and playlists to Rhapsody and get instant access to their huge catalog of millions of songs. We believe the Rhapsody subscription service is the best on the web, and with the recent launch of their new mp3 store, they just got a lot better. We couldn’t think of a better home for our existing subscribers and we hope they’ll love the Rhapsody service as much as we do.

A lot of work was done under the hood to make the transfer from Yahoo! Music Unlimited to Rhapsody simple and secure. After a few quick steps, Rhapsody will pick up your subscription account information and continue your service with the same billing cycle and price you had with Yahoo! Music Unlimited. If you have a Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription, go to http://transfer.music.yahoo.com and sign in to get started. Only Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers can transfer their accounts to Rhapsody. If you’re not a subscriber and are interested in trying the Rhapsody service, you can check it out for free here. For more information and frequently asked questions about the transfer process, check out our help pages.

We sincerely appreciate the support of our Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers during its limited run. While the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service may be going away, the Yahoo! Music and Rhapsody partnership has just begun. We’re working on some incredibly exciting stuff and hope you’ll enjoy the new features we’ll be releasing in the coming months. Stay tuned!

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! Music

Nissan Live Sets – Redesign amongst Friends

Yesterday, we launched a redesign to one of our pillar live music programs, Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music. And, it is very fitting that we did so with one of the most memorable and ‘fan’-tastic musical experiences to have taken place on our stage. For those of you who haven’t seen this ‘Hootenanny,’ 300 courageous fans joined Weezer on stage and shared their musical talents. Yes, everyone is playing an instrument! See it here.

This Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music redesign focused on blowing out several key features of the program including:

1. Integrating a clean inline video experience. You can now watch the show inline, all from the same Nissan Live Sets page
2. Bigger/fuller photo galleries: the first time we’ve been able to integrate the high resolution, professionally taken photos of the cool artists we’ve had. No more tiny pictures!
3. A re-tooled blog that leverages Y! Music’s blog platform. This improvement more cleanly integrates the program with other y! music blogs and allows us to layer in related photos, videos and other popular galleries

This has been a major collaborative effort and I hope you enjoy it.

Abraco,
bill

Rhapsody and Yahoo!: MP3s and Free Song Playback

Some of you have been asking for details on the Rhapsody transition. We’ll be able to share more next week, but in the interim I wanted to give you a sense of the broader relationship between us and Rhapsody and some of the things we’ll be working on this summer.

I was privileged recently to attend the launch of our partner Rhapsody’s MP3 Store. We’ll be working with them to bring MP3 purchase to users of Yahoo! Music. Yahoo! has been a strong backer of DRM-free music for the past two years, since Dave Goldberg, VP and GM of Yahoo! Music at the time, told the world that DRM had failed. A year ago, Ian Rogers declared that we would no longer invest resources in a fundamentally broken system of DRM that users had rejected. Now, we’re happy to bring MP3 downloads to our site so users can purchase any one of over 5 million songs to put on their iPods.

We’re also working with Rhapsody to bring playback of songs to our site. In fact, we just released our first version of the integration, which allows you to play full-length Rhapsody tracks on-demand from within our blogs section. We’ve launched a new blog called the Rolling Stone Song of the Day that will showcase a new song every day, playable for free thanks to Rhapsody. Very cool stuff. Stay tuned for more announcements in the next few months where we’ll be able to more fully describe how this offering will be integrated throughout our site.

Enjoy!

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music

Hello World!

Hey everyone,

With the Fourth of July recently passed I know what you’re all thinking: what the hell is with the price of gas??!

However, a few of you might also be asking yourselves: what’s happening with Yahoo! Music?

This is a question I can answer.

This blog was started by Ian Rogers, the previous General Manager of Yahoo! Music, who recently left to become CEO of a startup, where we wish him the best of luck. Since his departure, we haven’t really been blogging much, which means we haven’t been communicating with you, our loyal readers.

Well, we’re going to change this and get back to blogging so we can let you know what we’re up to.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Michael Spiegelman, I’ve been at Yahoo! Music since December 2003 and I’m now heading up the Music group. It’s an interesting time to be in the digital music space, as old business models crumble and new models emerge. We’re doing our part to evolve the digital music experience and develop new ways to connect people to the music they love.

In February we announced that Yahoo! was acquiring a small company called FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes has a small web app that sits in your browser and lets you remote control music listening from services such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Pandora, Last.fm and 25 other music players. The FoxyTunes team has now become an integrated part of our group (experiencing crazy culture shock along the way…ever try to find a kosher restaurant in Santa Monica?) and is working with our other engineering teams to integrate the FoxyTunes tools with other Yahoo! products.

We’ve also been having a lot of success with our Web Media Player (which internally we fondly call Goose), the brainchild of Lucas Gonze. Our Media Applications team has been building on Lucas’ great work to improve the player and put it in the hands of some of the top bloggers in the digital music space. You can now find it at these fine blogs:

Aurgasm
Aquarium Drunkard
Gorilla Vs Bear
Large Hearted Boy
Soul Sides

Speaking of blogs, our own Yahoo! Music Blogs, which we launched in November, are now drawing an audience of over 8 million unique users per month. Woo-hoo! Apparently, there might be something to this blogging thing after all.

On the Yahoo! Music site, we’ve been launching our new music videos section, video playlisting, blogs, charts and other features of our new platform internationally. I’m pleased to announce the launch of revamped sites in Canada, the UK, Spain, France and Germany, and also the launch of our brand-new site in Mexico. We’ll be re-launching our sites in Italy and Australia, as well as our Spanish-language site, in the next few weeks.

The final thing I wanted to talk about was how we’ll be embracing Yahoo!’s new strategy of openness. Jerry Yang and Sue Decker have talked a lot about how Yahoo!’s new mission is to become the starting point for great web experiences. We’re taking this to heart, and in the coming months you’ll see us opening Yahoo! Music up, so you’ll be able to find not just content from us, but also from other great services and sites.

Well, that’s all for now, but we’ll be blogging more frequently now to keep you up to date with our doings. As always, feel free to leave comments.

Until the next time,

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music

New FoxyTunes 2.0 Beta for IE

If you use Internet Explorer, please give the new FoxyTunes 2.0 Beta a test.

For a rundown of the features, see the team’s blog post.

If you’re at the other end of the user curve and testing Firefox 3, we have a version for you, too.

And if you’re just a plain ol’ Firefox user, just go to FoxyTunes.com and get the latest.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music