If you use Internet Explorer, please give the new FoxyTunes 2.0 Beta a test.

For a rundown of the features, see the team’s blog post.

If you’re at the other end of the user curve and testing Firefox 3, we have a version for you, too.

And if you’re just a plain ol’ Firefox user, just go to FoxyTunes.com and get the latest.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Prettying up

The changes that users will notice the most have to do with visible behaviors.

Smaller footprint

The player is now minimized when first loaded rather than half-open. This prevents it from taking up space in the page when it is not needed.

Our goal is to empower the page, not overpower it. A smaller footprint helps the media and text mesh seamlessly.

Steady scrolling

The player doesn’t flicker while you’re scrolling anymore. Previously, if you were using any browser besides IE7, scrolling the page would cause the player to fade out and fade back in when you stopped scrolling. Now the player hovers in place while you scroll without fading in and out.

Search doesn’t interrupt

The player contains a link to search on text related to the current track. This link used to open in the current window, which would interrupt playback. Interrupting playback was a bad surprise for many people. This link now opens in a new window.

New home

There is a brand spanking new home page.

This page isn’t intended to have any dynamic features. It’s purpose is to draw new people into understanding the important points and to give them a smooth experience when trying out the player for the first time.

Play this page

You can now use almost any document on the web as a playlist by
linking to that document and adding class="playthispage" to the link. We scrape the document to find media links and pull those links back into the current page. There will be a play button next to the class=”playthispage” link, and the remote media links will be added to the current playlist.
“Play this page” can handle many different document types. It can find enclosures in an RSS or Atom feed. It can read all common internet playlist formats, including XSPF, ASX, M3U, and PLS. It can read HTML, so you can use one web page as the playlist for another.

Example link:
<a href="http://www.example.com/" class="playthispage">
play example.com
</a>.

Things you can do with this feature:

• A podcaster can use their feed as a playlist for their web page without needing to create an additional playlist.
• A musician’s web site can have a single master page for all of their music and use it as the playlist for any other page in the site.
• A developer could mash up audio sites with other sites. For example, you could put a Wikipedia entry about a composer together with Archive.org recordings related to that composer.
• An XSPF playlist with artist, album, title and other metadata could be imported into HTML, which lacks music metadata fields.
• A playlist creator could make their playlist accessible in third party web pages which ordinarily would be hampered by cross-site scripting restrictions.

We implemented this feature using a web service that we host. That’s interesting in that it shows the benefit of our unusual architecture. Browser-based media players have traditionally been pure Flash. Our player will use anything it can get its hands on at run-time, including JavaScript, CSS, semantic HTML, web services, and, yes, Flash, and having access to our own web services made it possible to do this feature.

Cross-domain XSPF

We now have the ability to load XSPF playlists from any public source on the web. Previously we were bound by the Javascript same-origin security policy, which is even more restrictive than the Flash crossdomain.xml approach. Now we aren’t bound by either.

Bug fixes

The green disc in the minimized mode of the player was pulsing even when no audio is playing. The pulsing green disc is meant to let you know when the minimized player is playing audio. It now does that.

Safari was posting some JavaScript errors on page load. These errors shouldn’t show up anymore.

We fixed some display issues with error icons in Firefox when the player encountered a bad mp3 link. (But error messages are still in a messy state overall).

Fixed a bug where the play button was not playing the right song. You could reproduce this bug by clicking a play button on the page, then clicking pause, then clicking a play button for a different song on the page. Rather than playing that different song, the player would restart the song that was paused.

Browser cache time for the player JavaScript files is now one day.

Who

The core team for this rev: Amit, Clint, Dave W, Douglas, Lino, Mike D, Suman, and William Khoe. Thanks to Mike D and Dave W for much of the text of this post, and kudos to wwhite for the scraper web service.

Last year, shortly after I assumed the role of Yahoo! Music’s General Manager, we started saying publicly that we were “de-emphasizing” our premium music offering, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. The fact of the matter is that building a great premium music service takes a huge amount of resources and effort, and it was taking energy away from our important main offerings, music.yahoo.com (the Web’s #1 Music destination), music videos, and LAUNCHcast Radio. Around 25 million people visit Yahoo! Music each month. Relatively speaking, a small percentage of those use Yahoo! Music Unlimited, yet an large portion of our resources were being poured into this service. It was clear to us that we needed to make a major strategic shift.

It wasn’t an easy decision. We’re huge fans of Yahoo! Music Unlimited and those customers include many of our most loyal and valuable. We wanted to be sure those users had the best on-demand music experience available on the Internet.

As a result, we’re pleased to announce Rhapsody as our exclusive partner for on-demand music. Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers will have a chance to easily take their music catalogs and migrate to Rhapsody. Later this year we will be integrating Rhapsody into music.yahoo.com, so you can continue to use Yahoo! Music for music discovery, news, videos, lyrics, radio, concerts, blogs, and more, and always be a click away from music on-demand. Also, our subscribers will finally have access to the best off-PC experiences such as Rhapsody for TiVo, Sonos, and Control 4 in the living room.

We hope being able to take your Yahoo! Music Unlimited collection to the best subscription service on the Web — the one which works on PC or Mac, Firefox or Safari as well as TiVo, Sonos, etc. — at the Yahoo! Music Unlimited price, is an acceptable outcome. We sincerely apologize for any hassle and thank you for joining us in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited run. It was a wild ride for all of us.

I’m sure a question many people are going to ask is if this means Yahoo! is backing away from online music. Au contraire. It is a major strategy shift but we’re still investing in our music business as evidenced by my second bit of news: our acquisition of FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes is the world’s most popular media toolbar, a plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer. FoxyTunes adds useful functionality to more than 30 media players, including iTunes, Winamp, and Pandora. With FoxyTunes you can easily control your media player from the place you spend most of your time, your Web browser, and jump from a track playing in any media player to lyrics, biography, videos, or more music in a single click. What’s more, the innovative “Signatunes” feature helps you express yourself via your music tastes by automatically inserting signatures into your favorite email program (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail), social network messages (Facebook, MySpace), or blog authoring/commenting platform, based on the currently playing track.

For an excellent tour of FoxyTunes’ far-reaching functionality, please see the screencast on FoxyTunes.com.

While it doesn’t tell the whole story, this news, along with the recent news of our Web Media Player (for a great example of the player in use, check out Aurgasm.us), points the direction for a new Yahoo! Music. We’re focusing on delivering relevant music experiences on the Web and are happy to be partnering with Rhapsody to bring you a simple, integrated, on-demand music experience.

If you’ve never used Rhapsody, check out my best of 2007 playlist on Rhapsody now for free. And be sure to control Rhapsody.com and learn more about each artist with FoxyTunes.

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

When Lucas Gonze first started at Yahoo! more than two years ago, the first thing he told me was that we needed a microformat for playlisting. Since we’d just finished creating and implementing XSPF I was allergic to the idea of another format, this one in HTML instead of XML. But Lucas was right and (thankfully) persistent. He finally convinced me by pointing out the fact I was in denial of: “No 14 year-old MySpace kid is going to create an XML file, upload it to a 3rd party host, make sure the mime type is set correctly, etc. It has to be as easy as writing HTML to add media to Web pages, and shouldn’t involve proprietary technologies like Flash.”

We started playing with the idea and prototyping how this might work. Lucas created hTrack, the microformat. We learned a lot and decided what we wanted to build and how we wanted to roll it out.

A few weeks back we released step zero, our first road-tested version of our Web-based Media Player. The idea is insanely simple:

1) Add this single line of javascript to your page:
<script src=”http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js”></script>
2) Add a link to any MP3 to your page, like so:
<a href=”http://209.133.33.135/~icr/BeastieBoys/Denver_Intro_TimeForLiving.mp3″>Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver</a>

and BOOM, you have a media player. Of course there’s a lot more you can do with it if you’d like. For more advanced uses see the public wiki or join the mailing list and converse with some of the creative and talented hackers there (we also hang out in #heavy on irc.landoleet.org if you want to drop by).

Again, playing MP3s is just the beginning. Note that the version on Music.Yahoo.com supports our subscription service. The next version will support Ogg, WMA, and any codec you have installed. Of course we’ve got a plan for video (it’s not called the Yahoo! Audio Player).

The idea is to make media a first-class object on Web pages and and abstracted away from proprietary technologies. The video tag in HTML 5 is headed the right direction, but the hAudio microformat (which we tentatively plan to support) will get us there even faster.

We’ve been very happy with the response. c|net and others included the player in their blog posts about the player, but more importantly MP3 bloggers are adopting it and smart folks are finding other clever uses for it.

Hope you dig it. If not, let us know why so we can improve it. If you do use it, be sure to add a link to your site on the Wiki so we can check it out.

To see it in action, here are a few Beastie Boys songs I recorded from the sound board back in 1998:

Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver. Check the crowd noise when The Biz starts singing. Crazy.
Slow and Low, live in Kansas City
Ricky’s Theme, also from Denver
Flute Loop, recorded live in Chicago

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Subject line is a bit of a stretch…”months”? We did post back on Dec 18th…

But yeah, it’s time for an update.

I admit I’ve been giving more love to my personal blog lately.

Also, we should get some credit for the Yahoo! Media Player post on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog. Sorry for being too busy WRITING CODE to cross post to this blog.

I promise to have some updates very soon. Add us to your feed reader.

ian

A few months ago I posted on our release of the beta version of our new Homepage and Music Videos section. Today I’m excited to announce that we’ve exited beta and have made the new site available to everyone who visits music.yahoo.com.

WOO-HOO!!!

As I mentioned in July, this is the first significant change that we’ve made to our site since 2001. Since then, a lot has changed on the Internet, but our music website has remained the same, almost attaining the kind of affectionate status you reserve for an old sweatshirt that is incredibly comfortable but makes your Significant Other cringe every time they see it.

When we started this project many months ago, we had little idea of what the site would look like when done, but we had some pretty clear ideas about where we wanted to go. We’d spent some time talking to people who use our site and assessing opinions through surveys to determine where we wanted to take the site. I dug up some of my old documentation to remember what the heck I was thinking when we started this project, and thought I’d share what we wanted to do and how the end product stacked up:

Editorial Voice: A while back, my colleague Todd Beaupre did a great presentation on the need for more editorial voice on our site. The challenge is that while people who use our site love getting context to better understand the music they hear and the videos they watch and often appreciate the recommendations of our editorial staff on what’s new and worth a listen, we cater to 25 million people each month and finding an editorial voice that appeals to everyone and turns off no one is pretty impossible. So we decided to create several editorial channels and let our users pick from among them.

We ended up developing two editorial placements on our new Homepage: one is the large module in the upper left-hand side of the page that showcases our best picks of videos, music, photos and lyrics. The other is our Music Blogs module, found at the bottom of the page, that lets our bloggers communicate their favorite music, playlists, great (or truly horrifying) moments in entertainment and everything else you need to know about the wide world of music. The bloggers are really an exceptional group, including our own Dave DiMartino and Lyndsey Parker; bloggers from some great publications and sites like MOJO, Arthur, NME, URB, Spin and JamBase; and other fine folks from outside of Yahoo! who are sharing their playlists and observations about the music scene. One great find here is a blog that we recently kicked off on hearing that Led Zeppelin is getting back together. Our Executive Editor Dave DiMartino will be posting some great, exclusive stuff in the coming days. The best part of the blogs feature is that we put our users in control of what they see: if you click through to our main blogs page you can select which blogs you want to see, and screen out the ones you don’t like.

I have to say that since we released our site in beta, the blogs have become one of the most popular areas of the new site, as well as one of my personal favorites.

Personalization: Ever since we created LAUNCHcast Radio back in the dawn of (Internet) time, our team has spent a lot of time investing in better ways to get you the music you like and not waste your time with music you don’t dig. We’ve now taken the same technology that powers LAUNCHcast and Yahoo! Music Unlimited (YMU) recommendations and brought it to our site. The middle of our new Homepage page has a section with Videos, Songs, Albums and Artists, all personalized to your tastes. You’ll also see a similar module on the new main music videos page that’s focused on music video content.

If you haven’t started rating music, click on ‘Improve My Recommendations’ and start telling us what you like. The music you rate will also influence your personal radio station and your YMU recommendations.

Live Music: My love for music got re-awakened four and a half years ago at the Coachella Music Festival in 2003, so I have a deep appreciation for live music. We’ve partnered with Yahoo!’s Upcoming service to bring you information about music events around the country, anything from large concerts to shows at your local neighborhood bar. Check out the module on the lower left-hand side of the Homepage for a snapshot of concerts, and click on ‘View more concerts’ for a longer list of shows. The events on Upcoming are submitted by users such as yourselves, so please click on the ‘Get Started’ button on the button of the module to tell us about concerts we’ve missed.

Video Playlisting and Stations: One thing a lot of users told us during our research is that they wanted to more easily queue up a bunch of music videos and play through them. We created two ways of doing this: one is video playlisting, and the other is our music video stations. Video playlists are accessible through the My Music bar on the right-hand side and allow users to set up a list of videos and play through them. Music Video Stations are available from the main Music Videos page (click on the ‘Videos’ tab in the navigation bar) and are programmed by our editorial team to reflect the best music videos from different genres, eras and our original programs.

Sharing Tools: Music is an inherently social experience, so we’ve taken some first steps to let you share your musical tastes with others. If you click on the link for a music video, you’ll come to a page that will show you the embed code for the video.

If you copy and paste that code into any HTML page, the video will appear in an embedded player. This can be used to include your favorite music videos on any website or personal page. One note is that not all of the record labels have given us rights to have embed codes for their music videos, so there may be some videos that we don’t let you share. We are working on trying to get rights for all of our videos as fast as we can.

This embed code functionality is just the first step in making the music experience on our site more social. I recognize that this is an area where we’ve really lagged in the past couple of years, but we’re committed to changing that. In the next several months, you’ll see us add a lot more features to make the idea of music community on our site a lot stronger, culminating in what I think are some very innovative ideas in this area. So if you’re looking for more social tools and sharing functionality, stick with us and I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Music Playback: One thing we didn’t plan for in the beginning of this experience but incorporated along the way is better playback of songs. If you click on any play button for a song (but not a video) on the new Homepage, we’ll play back the song in a very slick new audio player that slides out on the left-hand side of the page. If you’re looking for some selections, try the Charts module on the left-hand side of the page and select ‘Songs’ from the drop-down, or click on the Songs tab in the recommendations module in the middle of the page. Most users will get 30-second samples, but YMU subscribers will hear full-length tracks, just like in the Yahoo! Music Jukebox. This is a little gift to our subscribers, and a taste of more to come next year.

User Suggestions: During the time when we were out in beta, many users gave us feedback on what they liked and didn’t like about the new site. While many users were very positive, some told us things they wanted to see improved. There were three main comments:

• My Videos: users wanted easier access to the videos they’ve rated so they can play their favorite stuff. We added a link to ‘Videos I’ve Rated’ in the navigation bar, under the main ‘Videos’ link, to provider easier access to this content.
• My Radio: some users have had trouble finding their personal radio station. There are two ways to access it in the new site: hover over the ‘Radio’ link in the nav and click on ‘Play My Station’, or look on the Homepage (or any of the pages with the new design, like blogs, concerts, charts or the music videos section) and you can see a link to play your personal station on the right-hand side of the page. If you don’t have a station, just start rating some music and one will be created for you.
• Videos by Genre: our old site had a link in the videos nav to videos organized by genre. We’ve moved that navigation to the main Music Videos page with a navigational system that we think is easier to browse. We’re looking at some ways to make this more visible to help out those of you who are looking for quicker access to this feature.

Well, I think I’ve said enough about the new pages. I hope you all are happy with the new Homepage and Music Videos experience. We’ll be updating the features as we go along so stay tuned for more improvements in the coming months. We also recognize that some major areas of our site, like the Artist section and the Radio section, have not yet been redesigned. Tackling these pages is next on our list, so look for improvements early next year.

And PLEASE feel free to give us your thoughts and opinions on what you like and what you don’t like. We really do read that stuff and use it to make decisions. Just click on the ‘feedback’ link in the footer and send us your comments.

Enjoy!

Michael Spiegelman
Product Guy
Yahoo! Music

We’re pleased to announce the Purple Award, a heavy, sexy pair of purple headphones given to superstars which manage to achieve 10 MILLION plays on Yahoo! Music. These plays could be from any of our fabulous digital music offerings, Music Videos, LAUNCHcast Radio, or Yahoo! Music Unlimited, or any of our original programs such as Live Sets, SMASH, Who’s Next?, and Get Your Freak On.

But we’re not just giving these away, we’re setting high standards and using a third party to verify the numbers. Since the onset of SoundScan (the music sales charts) and BDS (the song tracking service that makes up the Billboard charts), the music industry has become much more about the real instead of the old-school smoke and mirrors way of trying to fool/hype music fans into believing something is hot when it really isn’t. Even in this new generation of the music industry, other web sites count plays even if you only heard a couple seconds of a song/video before stopping it or navigating to another page. It’s no coincidence that many of the top artists on some social networking sites are scantily clad women as people are going to their pages to look at their pictures instead of listening to their music. We feel it’s imperative to only count a “play” as a song or video that’s been heard/watched for at least 60 seconds. That way we know for sure you’ve heard the core of the song. Anytime you skip a song or video before the one-minute mark, we don’t count it as a play and it doesn’t count towards the 10 million needed to receive a Purple Award. Also, we’re using BDS to count the plays, so all plays are validated by a third party. All on the up and up, baby.

But let’s get on to the part you’re all waiting for, the winners! We’re announcing ten winners from the last year to kick off the award, and will then be announcing winners as they hit the 10 million mark. So here’s our initial batch of Purple:

Akon f/Eminem, “Smack That”

Beyonce’, “Irreplaceable”

Ciara f/Chamillionaire, “Get Up”

Ciara, “Promise”

Evanescence, “Call Me When You’re Sober”

Fergie, “London Bridge”

Justin Timberlake, “SexyBack”

Justin Timberlake, “What Goes Around…Comes Around”

Nelly Furtado, “Say It Right”

Shakira f/Wyclef Jean, “Hips Don’t Lie” 

All the best,
John Lenac
Yahoo! Music

This one’s for all the haters that blogged about my hip hop speak in the Sansa Connect post a few months back…

“Yo, son, you’re a beast on the mic. Why don’t you put down that broom and take it to the stage?”

“Man, I been hustlin’ in this small town for ten years, ain’t nobody ever given me a shot.”

“Dude, have you seen Yahoo! Music LyricMakers? They’re giving some lucky ghostwriter-in-waiting the chance to pen Ne-Yo’s next joint.”

“Word?”

“Straight up, son. Get over there and get yours.”

“Aight. Hold this broom. I have to get over to Yahoo! Music.”

Yahoo! Music, McDonald’s, Ne-Yo. Ne-Yo makes the beats, you write the lyrics, Ne-Yo records the song.

When you think lyrics, think Yahoo! Music.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Another week, another launch of new features here at Yahoo! Music. This time, we’ve revamped our Music Videos Section. If you go to the new Yahoo! Music beta site and click on Videos you can see the brand spanking-new pages, fresh off the presses.

Some of the highlights include:

• Featured Videos, bringing you the newest, hottest videos courtesy of John Lenac and his crack team of music programmers.
• Personalized Video Recommendations, based on your tastes. A whole section devoted to the music videos we think you’ll enjoy the most. Looking at mine right now: Groove Armada, Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, Moby…right on algorithm!
• Video Charts, showing what you all have played the most each week, every week.
• Video Stations, giving y’all a way to play great videos in your favorite genres with one click of the mouse.
• Video Playlists, my personal favorite. The new playlist builder tool (accessible from the My Music bar on the right-hand side of the pages) lets you easily build and edit your own video playlists.

Please check it out, and let us know what you think! We’re here to build great stuff for you, our users, so your feedback is always welcome. Positive feedback is even more welcome!

Cheers, and happy Video watching!

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music

Howdy folks,

Many of you may have noticed that our beloved Yahoo! Music site, though rich in content, has become a bit outdated in look and feel. Ok, I’ll admit it: the site looks like something out of 2001. That’s because we haven’t changed it much since, well, 2001.

We’ve finally decided to change that. Today we’re launching our new Homepage in beta, with a new feature set that we hope you’ll love as much as we do. Some of the new goodies include:

• What’s New Today: the top module on the page will bring you the best picks from our editorial team, served up twice daily. Ranging from the popular to the brand new and from beloved to the bizarre, we’ll be showcasing the most interesting stuff the Music world has to offer.
• Personalization: If you’re like me and the editorial selections will seldom appeal to your off-beat tastes (ok, Lyndsey has promised to feature the new Chemical Brothers album this week! It’s pretty great, I highly recommend it), never fear! One of the most exciting features in my opinion is the new Personalized Recommendations module, which will provide recommendations of music videos, songs, albums and artists to check out, all based on your ratings. If you haven’t rated any music with us, now would be a great time to start.
• Charts: Everyone wants to know what’s popular, right? We’ve expanded our charts to include songs and albums, in addition to videos. If you click on ‘View All Charts’, you can drill down and see charts by genre, so you can dig in and check out the most popular indie rock songs, jazz albums or blues videos (yes, we really do have blues videos. Who knew?!)
• Blogs: We’re marching boldly into 2006 by embracing this whole blogging thing. I think it might be big. Seriously, I’m very excited that our editorial team has pulled together some great writers who will be taking on different beats, talking about everything from the week’s best new releases to the hip-hop scene to music from your favorite reality TV shows. We’re going to be adding more bloggers in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
• Concerts: Ok, this is one of my personal favorites. We’ve done a mashup with Upcoming, a user-generated events site that Yahoo! owns, to bring you listings of concerts happening in your local area. The Concerts page also includes a handy map. If you know a show is happening but can’t find it, just go to upcoming.yahoo.com and add it.
• My Radio: This is a preview of things to come, but we’ll be giving you persistent access to your personalized radio station throughout the new pages. This is something we’ll be rolling out across the rest of the site.

This re-launch of our new homepage is only the first step in our efforts to bring our site up to date and provide you with a much better user experience. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be revamping our entire site, adding new features, changing the look & feel, improving performance and adding fresh content. We hope you like it. If you want to make sure you see the brand new Homepage, just go to music.yahoo.com/beta. Please check it out and click on the ‘feedback’ link on the page to send us your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you.

One more thing: I want to publicly thank our very talented design, development and QA teams who make this all possible. It’s really a pleasure to work with smart, creative, energetic and passionate people. You guys really make it all possible. Thank you.

Go check it out!

Cheers,
Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music