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