New major FoxyTunes version – share tunes on Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook and more!

Today we’re excited to announce that TwittyTunes is officially a default feature within FoxyTunes! In addition to Twitter we’ve add support for Facebook, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Last.fm, and Yahoo! Status. With these services we let you share on your own terms – you can manually send messages to your social networks as well as setting up automatic services like Last.fm scrobbling.

Get the full scoop over at the FoxyTunes blog.

Download FoxyTunes for Firefox

Yahoo! Music iPhone App Powered by CBS RADIO

We’re proud to announce that you can now get all of your favorite radio stations through a free app for the Apple® iPhone™ and iPod Touch. The amazing team at CBS RADIO crammed a lot of great features into the Yahoo! Music app so that you will never be without your favorite music when you’re on the go. Here are just a few of the great features included:

• Browse through 20+ genres
• Skip up to six songs an hour
• Browse stations by genre or find local stations ‘near you’ utilizing GPS
• Share stations with friends
• Browse your listening history or recently played stations
• Buy albums/songs via iTunes
• Listen to 1010WINS, KROQ, WFAN and more than a hundred other CBS RADIO stations in addition to Yahoo! Music’s 150 music stations
• Add presets for instant access to your favorite stations

We’re extremely excited about the new Yahoo! Music iPhone App and think you will be too. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, download the app from iTunes now.

For more information about the new Yahoo! Music App powered by CBS RADIO, click here.

Stay tuned for more great products and features coming from Yahoo! Music and our friends at CBS RADIO.

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! Music

Control your YouTube with FoxyTunes

Some of you may have noticed on the FoxyTunes blog that we recently released support for YouTube within the FoxyTunes toolbar. This addition lets you not only control a single video, but also lets you navigate playlists full of videos. Do all this from the convenience of your FoxyTunes toolbar while you are surfing in other tabs.

Install the latest version and try it out with this Country YouTube playlist. Currently this feature only supports videos on YouTube.com, but we’re looking at ways to support embedded videos as well.

We know that you love your music and that YouTube is becoming a great source for music videos. We hope you enjoy this feature as much as we do.

Thanks,

Stephen Garcia

Yahoo! Music

Easy access to Music data through YQL

Hey all,

We’ve been working with our friends at Yahoo! Developer Network to make accessing the Music API simpler and easier to use with other services. We’re happy to announce the availability of our Music services within the Yahoo! Query Language environment (YQL).

The YQL platform provides a single endpoint service that enables developers to query, filter and combine data across Yahoo! and the rest of the Web. YQL exposes a SQL-like SELECT syntax that is both familiar to developers and expressive enough for getting the right data. For example, you can search for an artist to use in mashups with other services (warning, small bits of tech speak ahead):

select * from music.artist.search where keyword=”Coldplay”;

If you head over to the YQL Console, click on the data tables module in the right panel, you can begin to play around with the available music tables. You can even create your own tables to share with the larger community.

Many other cool things in the latest release of YQL. You can find out all the juicy details on the YQL team blog.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Stephen Garcia

Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music Relaunch

Hey all,

I haven’t posted in a while, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. Quite busy in fact: for the last several months we’ve been working on a new platform for Yahoo! Music.

Today I’m happy to announce the re-launch of Yahoo! Music, with a focus on a new platform for bringing the best of the music web to our users. The principal focus of the re-launch is our new Artist Pages, which will now bring you content from Rhapsody, iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, and Ticketmaster, in addition to Yahoo! Music Videos, Flickr photos and other Yahoo!-provided content.

Yahoo! has been talking a lot about openness in the past several months, and how we’re well-positioned to help users to successfully navigate the web. This strategy is very applicable to digital music: when I started at Yahoo! Music in December of 2003, services like MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm and Pandora didn’t exist. Now users have a wide array of choices, offering music videos, radio, on-demand streaming, downloads and concert information.

This presents an obvious challenge to Yahoo! to remain relevant in music. Through this new platform we’ll continue to remain an important source of music information and media to the more than 20 million users who visit music.yahoo.com each month. What we realized was simple: we don’t have to be the primary provider of these services in order to bring them to our users. Last.fm and Pandora have great online radio services. They compete with our own LAUNCHcast Radio, but offer different experiences: some users may prefer our radio offering, while others may gravitate to one of the others. What we want to do is to offer users choices: if you want to get your music from iTunes, that’s ok. And if you prefer Amazon or Rhapsody, that’s ok with us too.

Some of you may wonder if we’re limiting choice to only the largest music services out there. It’s true that our initial launch focuses on the major music providers, since we wanted to make sure that the most-used music products were represented in our new site. However our roadmap for the new Artist Pages will enable us to continue opening up. Over the next few months, we expect to add more modules and services to help round out the offering. After that, we’ll open up our APIs so that third-party developers can add their applications to our Widget Gallery and users can access their features on our site. Finally, we’ll be completely opening up to artists and labels so they can directly upload content to the Artist Pages. At that point we’ll have a fully open system that enables consumers, artists and music services to interact with each other through our site.

Underlying this approach is a simple philosophy about Yahoo! Music’s place in the world of digital music. MySpace Music is doing a great job of providing the ‘voice of the artist’ and enabling artists to promote themselves. YouTube will be developing a deep offering around music videos. iTunes and Amazon are great at fulfilling demand: if you know what you want, you can go to these services and easily buy songs. Rhapsody owns the subscription space, while Last.fm and Pandora have top-notch custom radio offerings. If you want to read some amazing artist biographies, check out Wikipedia: the Bob Dylan page is a work of art.

But if I go to Wikipedia, I can’t play Bob Dylan’s songs. If I go watch some great videos from The Chemical Brothers on YouTube, I can’t listen to their radio station on Last.fm. And the MySpace Music page for a band doesn’t show you objective news on an artist, and only allows you to buy music from their preferred provider. What if that’s not your preferred provider?

So there’s a pretty clear opportunity for us here: to help bring together the best of the music web, everything the web knows about an artist, to our users. We want to give our users everything the web has to offer, in a way that’s curated and makes sense for the world of music.

Along the way, I think we can do something big for the artist community. MP3 stores have been great at fulfilling demand. What we want to do is to be a driver of demand. Music sales was once a $30B business. Last year digital downloads was a less than $3B business. As my friend Mark Walker says, the gap there is the opportunity for innovation. Will downloads allow artists to completely cross that gap? I don’t think so. But I do think that if you provide an opportunity for fans to get interested in a band through reading about the artist, checking out photos and getting exposed to their videos; and then you allow them to stream their music and listen to them on the radio; and then you present the opportunity to buy music, concert tickets and merchandise, that you can help grow the music market and enable artists to better make a living from music.

I was on a panel several weeks ago at Digital Music Forum East and my co-panelist Richard Gottehrer from The Orchard was asked: in a world where analog dollars are turning into digital pennies, what should an artist do? His response? “Make more pennies.” I agree 100%. The digital world provides artists with unparalleled opportunity to make music, and make money from music. You provide great music, we’ll provide the platform to reach an audience.

I’ve been asked by a lot of people if this means that we’re getting our of the direct content business, especially since we transitioned Yahoo! Music Unlimited to Rhapsody and are now running LAUNCHcast Radio off the CBS Radio platform.

My answer is: absolutely not. We’re just changing where we allocate our focus.

We still offer over 40,000 music videos (now they’ll appear alongside videos from YouTube on our artist pages). Our music blogs are doing astoundingly well: there’s a real hunger for the contextualization of content out there. When we launched the music blogs late last year, they got 1.8M users during the first month. In February, our music blogs got 13.6M users, driven by coverage of the Grammys and big music news. Growth of almost 12M users in a little over a year shows how important the human touch is in sorting through music and news and making it relevant to people. We’re also not stopping producing great original content. Pepsi Music is alive and well on our site, and we look forward to the launch of a new emerging artists program in the next few weeks.

So please head over to our site, search for your favorite bands, and check out our new offering. We hope you like it. As always, feel free to leave comments below. We always read them.

Michael Spiegelman
General Manager
Yahoo! Music

FoxyTunes for Firefox v3.5 Beta

Today we’re pleased to announce the release of FoxyTunes for Firefox v3.5 Beta. We’ve made some really exciting improvements that we hope you enjoy.

Get FoxyTunes for Firefox v3.5 Beta.

We’ve made the controls smarter, updated the default skin and improved the menus so that you can do what you want faster and easier.

Get the full details over at the FoxyTunes blog and let us know what you think!

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

New FoxyTunes version and Planet updates

Today we’re releasing a few updates – a new version of FoxyTunes for Firefox and several enhancements to FoxyTunes Planet.

Following our mission to support any media players you might be using, the latest FoxyTunes for Firefox now supports AIMP2 and The KMPlayer media players. Stay tuned for more popular players being supported in the near future

We are also launching several enhancements on the FoxyTunes Planet website – first, there’s a whole new Yahoo! Music Videos widget, so now you have a choice between YouTube and Yahoo! Music video catalogs. The Rhapsody widget has been enhanced to play the top artist tracks right there on the page using the FoxyPlayer. We also tweaked the page layout a bit, and while we had to disable the Yahoo! Image Search and Hype Machine widgets for now, we’re definitely planning to add tons of cool new stuff to the pages in the near future. Finally, you no longer need to create an account and login to persist your widget layout and settings – so if you want to tweak anything in the new layout, feel free to do it without logging in.

Hope you like the new Foxy stuff, let us know what you think!

Search, Click Play, Hear Music

Yahoo! Search now offers full song playback directly from the Search results page for thousands of popular artists and songs.

In conjunction with Yahoo! Music’s new partnership with Rhapsody, we are pleased to announce the recent rollout of several improvements to Yahoo! Search’s music artist “WOW” shortcut originally launched in the Fall of 2007.

Now, in addition to gaining access to all of the artist background that you could before, you can also play up to 25 full songs a month, as opposed to the 30-second samples from before. And, by tapping into the vast catalog of songs available on Rhapsody, we’ve expanded the number of audio files that are available for playback and increased the number of tracks in the shortcut from three songs to four. If you want to look over a greater list of songs, you can now link directly to Yahoo! Music right from the shortcuts; full song playback will soon be enabled in Yahoo! Music as well, so stay tuned.

Yahoo! Search is using the FoxyPlayer (formerly known as the Yahoo! Media Player) to power the new Search experience. The player is easy-to-use, offers full functionality for song playback, and includes an expandable playlist tab. Users can continue browsing the results page while the player is in use, as search results will continue to scroll while the player stays in place near the bottom of the browser window. The player can be turned off at any time with a single click, or by simply navigating away from the Search results page. Try it out with a few of my favorites or go to Yahoo! Search and search for your own.

Pink Floyd
Johnny Cash
The Mars Volta

There’s no need to sign in to get your 25 full length streams. Just click a play button and the full length track will start playing. If you listen to all 25 songs before your 30 day period is up, you’ll hear 30 second samples until 30 days have passed from the time you first clicked play. If you are already a Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, you can listen to an unlimited number of songs through the FoxyPlayer. Just click the “powered by Rhapsody” logo in the player and click the link to sign in on the next page.

We at Yahoo! Music are pleased to have helped Yahoo! Search become the first major Search engine to offer full-song playback directly from the Search results page. We are confident our users will appreciate the enhancements we’ve made to the FoxyPlayer and music artist WOW shortcuts. Keep an eye out for more Rhapsody-related releases down the road, as we are planning several additional updates to showcase even more of Rhapsody’s deep music catalog in the near future.

For more information on our partnership with Rhapsody and how the FoxyPlayer works with Yahoo! Search, check out our help page.

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! 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