Shake It With Shakira

Who hasn’t wanted to shake it with Shakira? She is hot. And she has a new album, Oral Fixacion Vol. 2, also hot. So, to cool things down we threw a party, in November, in the rain, in New York City’s Times Square.

Now you might be asking yourself, why would Shakira want to sing, shake, and shiver with her band on an 8-foot wide billboard stage 100 feet in the air above Times Square, in the rain? To show her support for Yahoo! Music Unlimited ($5/month all-you-can-eat music), that’s why — we launched a new round of advertising that same day. Oh, and to promote her new album.

If you missed it, you can watch the performance on your own time from Shakira’s video page on Yahoo! Music.

And if you want to see some of the cool Yahoo! Music Unlimited marketing campaign, just click right over here.

Lauren Cassidy
Yahoo! Music

What is YMusicBlog.com?

Earlier this year, Jeremy Zawodny and Jeff Weiner suggested a Yahoo! Music blog similar to their YSearchBlog.com. After many months, invaluable help from Guy and Van at Yahoo! Hosting, and David in our design department (thanks for the header, yo), I finally have YMusicBlog.com up and running. I’m sure most folks at Yahoo! thought I would never really make it happen. Sorry, y’all. Thanksgiving break only comes once a year.

YMusicBlog.com is a venue for us, the Yahoo! Music team, to share with you what’s the haps at Yahoo! Music. We’ll post here about new products, product improvements, tips/tricks on using Yahoo! Music, industry news that affects Yahoo! Music, or just about anything we can somewhat relate to our jobs. We hope that you’ll add this blog to your blogroll via My Yahoo! or otherwise, and join us on our journey by leaving comments and feedback which we will then use to improve our products, which we will post to this blog about…and so goes the virtuous cycle.

While the folks posting at YMusicBlog.com are Yahoo! employees, this is not an “official” Yahoo! site. We’re posting here because we’re passionate about what we do for a living, want to communicate about it, and blogging makes it very easy for us to do so. We hope to inject our personalities into this site and as such would like to remind/warn you that each of the posts are the thoughts of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Yahoo!, Inc (aka The Mothership).

It’s nearly 2006. There are no men/women behind the curtain a la The Wizard of Oz. We are working for you, and unless we are friendly and familiar, how can we help each other? We hope you’ll get to know us, and we will continue to do our best to know each of you.

For ever ever,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Contact Us

The main purpose of this site is to decrease the distance between you, the Yahoo! Music user, and the people whose job all day (and often all night) is to build Yahoo! Music products and utilities. I thought it only appropriate to kick off this site with a helpful list of ways you may contact us, for your reference.

First of all, if you have technical questions about how our products work, please start by searching Yahoo! Music Help.

If you’d like to report a bug, please go here to choose which issue to report.

For customer support please include easy to understand details of your issue (”I clicked on the thing and it didn’t work” or “it’s all broken” doesn’t help us help you), any details about your computer (operating system, RAM, etc), and your Yahoo! user ID (very important so we can check the status of your account).

For community-based help use the Yahoo! Music Jukebox Message Boards or the LAUNCHcast Yahoo! Group. If you are a developer, please use the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Be sure you subscribe to this Weblog (ymusicblog.com) either via My Yahoo! or through your favorite RSS reader.

If you’d like direct, real-time access to folks from the Yahoo! Music team, join us in our public chat room. A few of us hang 24/7 in the channel #yme on the IRC server irc.landoleet.org. IRC is a chat tool that pre-dates the World Wide Web and is still an excellent tool for real-time group collaboration. Full-featured clients are available for every platform and we recommend mIRC for Windows, Snak for OS X, and BitchX for *nix platforms.

We ask that you refrain from emailing, calling, or sending notes via Yahoo! 360 directly unless you’ve exhausted all of the above avenues of communication. We’ve got families that we need to spend a little time here/there with. However, we hate to see you frustrated, so before you jump ship and start using a competitor’s product, please give us a chance to fix what’s broken for you.

Speak to you soon,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Better Message Boards

As some of you may have already noticed, we’ve upgraded our artist message boards this week thanks to a little help from the good folks on the Yahoo! Community team.

Our new message boards have a few great new features to help y’all out:

• Posts are now organized into threads on the page to allow for easier browsing and help you to follow conversations.
• We let you rate posts so you can show which of them are helpful. You can filter threads by ratings to see only the stuff the community finds useful.
• You can sort threads by rating or # of replies instead of just by date.

For an example, converse with others via the Gorillaz message board on Yahoo! Music. Or be the second person to get O.F.R. on the Nitro Message Board on Yahoo! Music. Or just go to Yahoo! Music, search for an artist and check out ‘Message Boards’ on the left-hand side of the artist page.

Take a look at the new boards, and let us know what you think!

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music