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