Delicious Music. Play your bookmarks.

We’re very excited to announce that FoxyPlayer is now part of the largest social bookmarking site in the world, Delicious.

Our good friends at Delicious are providing a great place to store everything you find on the Internet and have long been committed to supporting mp3 playback. The introduction of Yahoo! Music’s FoxyPlayer extends the playback experience by allowing continuous play of multiple bookmarks as one big playlist, support for a plethora of file types, and links to get more information about the currently playing track.

To try this out, you can filter by the “system:media:audio” tag, then filter further by the type of media you’d like to hear – like the name of the artist, genre etc. The results can include podcasts, mp3, music, and a whole host of other file types. Now you can play all them all using the FoxyPlayer!

By the way, if you like to listen to music while you surf, you can launch FoxyPlayer on Delicious and control it with FoxyTunes while surfing in other tabs.

Here are a few examples of ways to listen:

http://delicious.com/tag/system:filetype:mp3+jazz+free
http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:audio+npr
http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:audio+podcast

Now it’s time to sit back, relax, and listen to your bookmarks.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

-Stephen Garcia

LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS

Hey everyone,

Today Yahoo! Music made a big announcement: we’ll be partnering with CBS Radio to offer a jointly operated radio service to our users, which will be called LAUNCHcast Radio powered by CBS.

This will replace our existing service by moving radio to the CBS Interactive platform, with CBS providing the content, radio player and advertising. Our content team will continue to program our wide array of 150 radio stations using the CBS programming tools.

Though we’re announcing this today, the first release will take place on Feb. 12th, 2009, with subsequent releases afterwards to add features and functionality.

I’d like to walk you all through the rationale for this and then talk through the changes to the product.

In the past year and a half, the cost of operating Internet radio has changed drastically. There have been a series of court decisions, one in March of 2007 and one in April of 2008 that greatly increased the cost of Internet radio, to the point where we would be losing a lot of money if we continued to operate LAUNCHcast in its current form next year.

Yahoo! has never made a lot of money from Internet radio: it’s generally been a consumer feature and not a big profit center. However, we really couldn’t afford to pay the new rates, so we therefore faced a choice: either cripple the product to greatly reduce listenership, or find a partner with strengths in radio and different economics.

CBS Radio and Yahoo! started a discussion about the future of web radio several months ago. At the time, we were very impressed by their platform. CBS has a long tradition in the radio space, and has recently invested heavily in developing a great platform for the delivery of Internet radio. They’ve improved their offering by adding Last.fm and adding it to their family of companies.

The most critical part of our discussion was to ensure that any potential partner was committed to Internet radio and its users. CBS clearly has that commitment and is in it for the long haul.

CBS also has a great understanding of how to develop an excellent radio product. They’ve taken their deep knowledge of radio and built a platform that enables sophisticated programming, and through Last.fm they have access to great personalization technology.

So how will this affect users of LAUNCHcast Radio? When we flip the switch in February, here’s what you’ll see change:
- For the first time, the new ‘LAUNCHcast powered by CBS’ player will work on Firefox and on Macs, bringing LAUNCHcast radio to all of you who don’t use Internet Explorer. Yes, this is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, and it’s finally here.
- We’ll keep programming 150 radio stations for your enjoyment. You may see the content change slightly as we adjust to the new tools and catalog, but for the most part we’ll be offering the same radio stations, which will be programmed by our team here at Yahoo! Music using the CBS tools. All of these stations will now be free.
- We’ll continue to offer artist fan radio, which plays music related to an artist that you select. This will be offered as part of the redesigned artist pages we’ll be launching early next year.
- We’re going to be phasing out LAUNCHcast Plus. For all of you subscribers, we’ll be offering refunds for the remaining length of your subscription when we make the change on February 12. We will be making all subscription stations absolutely free, and will offer all audio at the higher quality bitrate.
- The major change you’ll see is that our beloved customized LAUNCHcast Radio will be going away. We spent a long time trying to figure out how to get this to work with the CBS platform, but unfortunately it wasn’t technically feasible. I understand that many of you have invested long hours in building your radio station, but the fact is that due to the increasing rates, we can’t continue to offer this service. Your ratings will continue to be accessible and those ratings will power recommendations of songs and music videos on our homepage, as well as your personalized music video station. We’ll also be introducing some social functionality in the next few weeks which will allow you to use your ratings to share music with friends across Yahoo!. Next year, we’ll be collaborating with CBS and Last.fm to redesign a set of personalized functionality for our site, as it’s something we certainly view as very important.

So that’s what we’re up to. Please feel free to post questions in the comments or refer to our FAQs for more info. We’ll try to answer all the questions as best we can.

Thanks,

Michael Spiegelman
General Manager, Yahoo! Music