Yahoo! Music Takes Off In Canada

You oughta know, Yahoo! Music Unlimited takes off to the Great White North today as we deliver our heavenly-priced ($6.99/month Canadian) subscription service to Canada. All Canadians can try out the service free for seven days, and Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet customers get two months free! That’s two triumphant months of unlimited, free music downloads, smooth as April wine.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, not only does this fantasy give you access to an international catalog of more than 1 milllion songs, you get the same fantastic personalization (if you could read my mind, you still might not be as good as Yahoo! Music’s recommendations), community, portabilty, and the spirit of LAUNCHcast Radio as we offer to American women. And as a subscriber you have access to permanent downloads for just 89 cents. Now not just the lucky ones need to be working for the weekend to get their favorite music and they’ll be lovin’ every minute of it!

Rockin’ in the free world,
ian c rogers, with invaluable help from Jay Frank who freestyled most all of the Canadian music puns (including three Loverboy references in a single sentence) leaving my jaw on the floor and side hurting from laughing (thanks Jay)
Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music Unlimited Charts Widget

While the Yahoo! Widgets Team (formerly Konfabulator) was slaving away on the 3.0 release of the Widget Engine a few months ago, they carved out some time to create a nifty little Widget for viewing and sampling Yahoo! Music Unlimited charts. This is a great music discovery tool that works seamlessly with the Yahoo! Music Engine.

The Yahoo! Music Unlimited Charts Widget displays top-10 song, album or artist charts (your choice) based on popularity among Yahoo! Music listeners. The UI displays album cover art for five songs/albums/artist at a time and scroll buttons let you easily view the top-10. Clicking on an album cover reveals the rank order of the music selected along with song, album and artist info. A headphone icon also links you directly to the selected item within the Yahoo! Music Engine for effortless previewing and listening.

One of the coolest things about the Charts Widget is the depth of genre selection. All major genres in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited catalog are clearly represented, and you can also do a deep dive into the sub-genre of your choice. Simply right click on the Widget UI, select a top-level genre, then drill down to your favorite niche.

You’ll need Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0 to get started, then grab the Charts Widget and you’re set. Discovering music has never been so easy. Have fun!

Gary Brotman
Yahoo! Music

Y! Music Unlimited and the Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge

I’ve seen your house. Not only do you have a bunch of magazines sitting around that you need to throw away because you’re never going to read them but you also have CDs and CD cases piled by your stereo. Of course the CDs do not match the CD cases. And of course the songs on the CDs do not number far more than one million, like the songs you can play for one (cheap, $5) monthly price through your Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription.

But you do have a PC in the home office, or a laptop that roves around, or is on that Ikea desk next to your bed (dude, pick up the Doritos bag off that thing). So what you do is you get the new Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge (available for $80 from Newegg.com), connect it to your stereo (plug it into that AUX or VCR input you’ve never used), fire up Y! Music Engine, and play some music. The Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge will magically shoot music through your home network and into your stereo.

Now put those CDs in a closet, you don’t need them anymore. And throw away any magazine older than this month. Time to start anew.

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Y! Music and Sheraton Hotels: This (could be) Huge!

On January 9th, Yahoo! officially hopped into bed with Sheraton Hotels in a ground-breaking partnership which brings free internet and a lot more to the weary traveler.

We’re starting small, first trying this program out in 4 hotels. Sheraton guests in these lucky flagships will have lobby lounges decked out with Yahoo! branded internet stations and have access to free wireless in their rooms.

The default home page when browsing in the hotel will be act as a “virtual concierge”. They will be hotel-specific, offering local news, weather, tourist information, and a lot more relevant info for guests.

The best part, however, is the access guests get to special Yahoo! trial offers. Standing far above the crowd of offers is the 1 month free trial to critically acclaimed, much celebrated Yahoo! Music Unlimited. Guests also will be able to score 1 month free trials to Yahoo! Games, Finance, Briefcase, and Mail Plus.

Check out the Yahoo! Link @ Sheraton hotel-specific home pages in our first 4 hotels, San Diego, Stamford, CT, Boston, New York City. (Sorry, you won’t be able to get the free trials at these pages unless you have a special code from Sheraton)

As you can see, we’re bringing more to the table than just free Wi-Fi. Here’s hoping this starts a successful movement.

Michael Cowan
Yahoo! Music

Pocket Tunes Brings Y! Music Unlimited to the Treo 600 and 650

Pocket Tunes, the Palm app that turns your Palm device into a subscription-capable media player, now supports the Treo 600 in addition to the 650, Zire, Tungsten, and LifeDrive Palm devices. It’s supported the 650 for a while, but the 600 support is new. WARNING: we haven’t tested this, we’re just taking their word for it.

I’ve done countless demos for people where they get all up in arms about how Yahoo! Music Unlimited songs aren’t playable on their iPod, only to point out that they are playable on the device they have in their pocket, their Treo. Is the Treo the most popular subscription music-capable device? If so, how many Treo owners have made the connection?

Speaking of subscription-capable devices, congrats to Creative and their Zen Vision: M for winning Best of Show at CES! Sweet device. You know my address, yo.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music Welcomes Webjay and Lucas Gonze

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the addition of Lucas Gonze and Webjay to the Yahoo! Music family.

I met Lucas more than a year ago when searching for a suitable default playlist format for the Y! Music Engine and stumbling across his excellent survey of playlist formats. We quickly became involved in the quest for the last playlist format the world would ever need (with help from many other smarties, such as Robert Kaye), the result of which is the extensible and open XSPF format that is starting to make the kids dance these days. Anyone involved in the XSPF project will tell you that I was completely useless and Lucas (and others!) was (were) indispensable.

A couple years back, Lucas created Webjay, a site for easy creation and playback of playlists from the Web. Users can create playlists using music/audio/video from around the Web (with a simple Web form, from scraping a Web page, or with a fancy Ajax interface created by a 3rd party using Webjay APIs), share them with others, include them on their Web sites, browse other users playlists, play the playlists in any media player, or cannibalize the playlists to create new ones. With Dave Goldberg (head of Yahoo! Music) running around telling people that the playlist is the next frontier in digital media, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re interested in what Lucas is doing with Webjay. Y! Music Engine has some interesting playlisting features, open APIs, and more goodies on the way. Lucas will help shape our strategies around playlisting in the future.

Webjay is visionary and fantastic, but we are also keenly interested in Lucas the individual. He’s contributed a lot of great work to standards around music on the Internet, and has always pushed forward a refreshing perspective of openness and progress without turning a blind eye to infringement or the rights of copyright holders (likely because he’s a musician himself). His recent creation of the meme “Lightnet” is a culmination of years of working under this philosophy. Philosophically I see Lucas as a brother in arms, and am looking forward to continuing to drive standards-based innovations which grow the digital media markets. Next on our list, XIPF, the extensible interactive packaging format, an open standard for digital packaging (think album covers — for more info join the XIPF mailing list and we’ll be building a proper home base for XIPF soon).

Please join me in welcoming Lucas to Yahoo!. Look out. We’re building a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude.

I would personally like to thank Michael Marquez, Patti McGuire, Paul Saraceni, Dave Goldberg, and Lloyd Braun for their support in making this happen. And special thanks to David Hall, who’s as big a fan of Lucas as I am, if not bigger.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

ps – we’re still hiring a product manager to help with Music.Yahoo.com. if you think you’re qualified, please send me a link to your resume via my 360 page.

GRAMMY Awards on Yahoo! Music