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

Everyone Deserves Music

As Jim mentioned back in July, we created a Music Videos application on Facebook that makes it easy to find and share videos with your Facebook friends.

A few weeks later we teamed up with RockYou, one of the most popular developers of Facebook applications, to launch a new version that is integrated with some of their cool apps like Super Wall.

Now, we’re bringing the best music videos on the planet to two more places where music lovers hang out (read: everywhere), Piczo and Bebo.

Like Ian said, it’s about convenience, and more importantly: context. What that really means is that we all discover music every day as we walk through life (both offline and on) so putting up walled gardens and surrounding them with armies is just silly. When you express yourself through music, anyone that digs your taste should be able to hit play and see if you’re onto something, and vice versa. We don’t get a lot of mail asking us to make it harder to find, share, and buy music, or that we keep it bottled up behind a yahoo.com address. Thanks to emerging web standards, those barriers are fading too.

So, wherever you’re spending your time online, you can bet we’ll be there slinging music, and more importantly, giving you the tools to do it yourself. Because, like Michael said, everyone deserves music.

Mark Collier
BD Guy
Yahoo! Entertainment

Playlists, new samples player, web subscription playback

Continuing the torrential pace of new software, we have released a playlist page, a new player for thirty-second samples, and the ability to play subscription tracks in the browser. All of this software is somewhat beta.

Until a few weeks ago, when you opened a playlist created in Yahoo! Music Jukebox in the browser you were likely to get a nearly-blank white page that looked like an error message. No more. You will now see a full-featured module which includes the ability to play tracks and to comment on playlists. You can browse playlists by creator and you can browse playlists which a person has commented on, so there is a content-focused social network.

Play buttons will give you full songs if you are a Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscriber, and 30-second samples otherwise. The player is now rendered in the page rather than in a pop-up window.

Here are some playlists to help you get started:

• The Big Takeover by Ian Rogers is, I think, about exploring fresh releases, and has tunes from Dizzee Rascal, Pharoahe Monch, Bad Brains, and Betty Davis.
• My Acid Soul playlist is instrumental soul jams.
• Ilianna Car Songs by Adam Brett is music for his baby daughter. This is a fun theme, and if you have another playlist like it you might want to leave a note on Adam’s playlist.
• International Lounge Music by Steve Raymond is a playable version of a text-only playlist published in Food and Wine magazine.
• Ode to Rubber playlist by the great Robert of the Radish. See also his personal blog entry about this playlist.
• Over In About An Hour: Volume 8 (dishwashing music) by Johnny O’Brien.  See also his personal blog entry about this playlist.
  

We hope you’ll dig it.

Release notes

• There isn’t yet a convenient way to look up a playlist URL or to your find your own playlists in the browser. If you have Yahoo! Music Jukebox you can open it up, navigating to a playlist, copy the link to the clipboard, then go to a browser and open that link. In the browser you can submit a comment on a playlist, then click on the link to your playlists in the posted comment.
• Yahoo! Music Unlimited playback only works in Internet Explorer on Windows. In Firefox you can either use the IETab plugin or wait for our own plugin to be ready.
• Many alpha users had to upgrade or rebuild their Windows DRM setup.
• Sample playback works on the Mac if you have Flip4Mac installed. We could only deliver subscription tracks if Windows DRM was supported, which it isn’t, so this is blocked on the same old same old. About Linux support, we’ll do samples if we can find a reliable way to do WMA in the browser.
• The new player is only used in the playlist pages for now. We will hook it up to the rest of the new pages soon.

How Do You Want It?

Well, we’re at it again – scrapping and clawing in the struggle for choice and openness. While it may seem a bit odd to view anything the size of Yahoo! as a scrappy underdog, it can sometimes feel that way when going up against some of the larger forces in the universe.In this case, our small victory comes in the form of the new album from fresh-faced Jesse McCartney — and the fact that you can buy it from Yahoo! Music in your choice of WMA format, or the classic MP3 format that we’ve all come to know and love. (Or you can get both, for you Jesse McCartney completeists) Sure, we made a splash when we offered Jessica as an MP3, and this is another step in that direction.

Check it out: http://music.yahoo.com/jesseright

But, a step in what direction? It has to do with this radical concept: Consumer choice.

Now, I caution anyone reading this to resist the urge to see the future of digital content as a war between DRM and an MP3 free-for-all. The prediction of some that all major labels will teeter and crumble is a bit premature – and probably not in anyone’s ultimate best interest. Some say all DRM is evil and a complete hindrance to any innovation. I happen to disagree. I believe that when executed well, rights management can open up a lot of doors that would be otherwise locked – portable all-you-can-eat subscriptions being one notable example. Nobody has all the answers yet. Some say revolution, but I see an evolution coming, and I like it.

I’m not really here to debate DRM, though. What I really wanted to do is give a shout out to Jesse McCartney and Hollywood Records. The real point here is that there may be a better way to do this business down the road. Maybe what’s important isn’t picking one or the other, but offering real choice to music lovers out there. More folks are starting to understand that. Today, you can buy Right Where You Want Me in a format that suits you. We hope that in the near future, you’ll have the choice buy all your music that way.

Mick O.
Yahoo! Music

Buy A Customized MP3 At Yahoo! Music

You can buy a personalized version of the new Jessica Simpson song “A Public Affair” from Yahoo! Music’s Web Site (Music.Yahoo.com) for $1.99, and it’s an MP3. Dear digital consumer, even if you’re not into Jessica Simpson, and you’re not excited about spending $2 for a song, let me tell you, this is a bigger deal than you might think.

As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform.

We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway! And on the consumer end there is certainly some discount built into that $0.99 download for the fact that you can burn a limited number of times, can’t play it on your Squeezebox, can’t DJ it with your DJ software, and can’t make a movie out of it with iMovie? I certainly hope so. Un-DRM’d content is implicitly more valuable to a consumer.

Now put that next to the fact that Emusic carries most everyone aside from the major labels (even big indies like V2 and TVT — White Stripes and Lil’ Jon are available via Emusic), and you see why we’re dying for the rights to offer MP3 downloads for sale to our users.

Which is why we’re so excited about these personalized Jessica Simpson tracks. Not only is it pretty cool to have a version of the song which speaks to me (I was shocked to see they had “Ian”, did they do that for me?), but it’s in MP3 format, which I have no problem paying a little more for (though $1.99 is a premium price because of the PERSONALIZATION, not the DRM, the right price for MP3s is somewhere between $0.99 and there, IMHO).

We hope you see the importance of this, too, and pick up a copy for yourself and/or a loved one, even if you don’t love JS and think that $1.99 is too much to spend on an MP3.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Enjoy Yahoo! Music Unlimited on Linux

Disclaimer: This is NOT intended to start a Linux -vs- Windows flamewar, it is to inform Linux users that they can now enjoy the ability to use Yahoo! Music Unlimited on their Linux desktop.

Hit rewind and jump to the Burbank Skatepark around August of 2005. That was when I told Ian that I was going to make the full-time move from Windows to Linux. His reply: “Linux?…but there is no DRM in Linux”. There was nothing more for him to say, it was understood that I was going to have to say good-bye to my beloved Yahoo! Music Unlimited in my personal life. I have to use Windows on my box at work, so I would still have at least 40 hours of visitation rights every week. I am lucky to be able to listen to music while I work, but it becomes more like background music in an elevator when you are focused on work. My workplace YMU visitation rights were not allowing me the freedom to listen to music in a setting that would allow me to fully enjoy the music as it was intended to be, but I was determined to keep Linux as my primary operating system at home. I like to listen to music while I do my geek thing on the computer, but booting into Windows just to listen to music was even more painful than YMU missing from my life at home.

I recently found a tutorial that explained how to install the latest beta release of VMware Server on Ubuntu Linux. VMware Server is a server virtualization technology that allows you to run other operating systems on Linux or Windows. There is no need to shutdown your current operating system in order to use another operating system. You can enjoy both (or more) at the same time.

Unlike your traditional Windows setup, Linux allows you to have multiple virtual desktops. With virtual desktops, you can eliminate the clutter that fills your standard single desktop in Windows. One virtual desktop might contain a browser, a second desktop might contain a text editor, and a third desktop might contain a video player. It is easy to jump between desktops and easy to find what you are looking for without have to move a bunch of windows or try to locate the right program tab in your taskbar. I keep VMware Server running on one of my virtual desktops, just in case I need to do something in the Microsoft Windows universe.

After about a week of tinkering, it occurred to me, Yahoo! Music Engine might run on Windows XP in a virtual server. Sure enough, the Yahoo! Music Engine installs in the Windows virtual server as you would expect it to do so on any regular Windows desktop. I nervously logged into my Yahoo! Music Unlimited account and clicked on the first song that I could see. I was thrilled to discover that it worked.

Thanks to Peturrr and the wonderful VMware Server installation tutorial that they posted at ubuntuforum.org, the fine folks at VMware for their amazing server virtualization technology, and Yahoo! Music Unlimited. Now, you too can enjoy the sweet sounds of Unlimited music while using Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.

Tracy Moon
Yahoo!

Dave Goldberg to Record Labels: No DRM, Please

By now you’ve probably seen the news that Yahoo! Music’s General Manager (that makes him my bossman’s bossman), Dave Goldberg, urged record labels to ease back their insistence on DRM yesterday at the Music 2.0 conference. I was in the audience and quite proud to hear such a statement come from the head of the business unit for which I work as I agree wholeheartedly with him (note my post “On DRM” from last June). You can read about Dave’s statements elsewhere (Slashdot, c|net, Digital Music News, Digital Music Weblog, A VC, etc), but here’s a few interesting points/quotes from my notes:

• On-demand (digital downloads and subscriptions) are not the entirety of the “music business” online. The business of buying CDs, cassettes, digital downloads, etc is about $30B globally, while media supported music businesses (radio, music videos with ads, etc) is about a $40B business globally. Yahoo! Music is in both businesses.
• Despite tremendous progress of legal, for-pay music services, the mainstream digital media consumer today is still listening to CDs, Internet radio, and using P2P services. 80+ percent of the music on iPods is from ripping and 3% or less is from legal digital services.
• The playlist is key to Yahoo! adding value to digital music; it’s a unit of currency for users to create and share music with each other. Dave also gave a nod to Web 2.0 at Music 2.0, pointing to Web services as a way we will go “beyond the media player” with our music offerings this year.
• Exploring ways the music industry could help move the pay market forward, Dave asks the labels to lighten the DRM requirements. “DRM is not a consumer value proposition, it’s a consumer cost. It creates a nice barrier of entry for the tech companies, rather than something that’s beneficial to labels, artists, or consumers.” In the Q/A session after his keynote Dave pointed to eMusic as a service which offers MP3 files as part of their subscription, files which are easily burnable and play just fine on the iPod. Due to restrictions from the major labels we aren’t able to offer hit content in a similar fashion with Yahoo! Music Unlimited. He reminds us that the major labels are selling DRM-free content every day in the form of CDs. I agree with Dave. DRM definitely has a cost, and eMusic is showing that consumers are willing to pay a premium price for unfettered access to digital media. What value is DRM providing in our service? What is the cost? Is it worth this cost?
  What Dave is really asking the labels to do is to experiment along with us to grow legal music services as a category. Legal services are a very small percentage of the downloading activity on the Web, yet studies tell us people *are* willing to pay for high-value content and services. The larger subtext of the “No DRM” message that got headlines is: help us build great legal services for users, don’t hold us back.
• Yahoo! Music served 4 billion videos last year (which, if you believe another figure that 17B videos were served on the Web last year, Yahoo! Music videos were fully 20% of the Internet’s video traffic in 2005).

Ironically, I went from Music 2.0 to UCLA’s Anderson’s school to participate in a panel about DRM, where I talked way too much. Like Jack White said, “Any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most.” That was me. Sorry, y’all.

Oh, and, sorry this damn post took so long. I had to fly up to the Yahoo! offices in Sunnyvale for some meetings today which, after the UCLA thing last night, left me no time to post about this. My loss, I missed a whole day of net buzz and maybe even a /.-ing for ymusicblog. That is teh suck. Damn day job.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music