This Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music redesign focused on blowing out several key features of the program including:

1. Integrating a clean inline video experience. You can now watch the show inline, all from the same Nissan Live Sets page
2. Bigger/fuller photo galleries: the first time we’ve been able to integrate the high resolution, professionally taken photos of the cool artists we’ve had. No more tiny pictures!
3. A re-tooled blog that leverages Y! Music’s blog platform. This improvement more cleanly integrates the program with other y! music blogs and allows us to layer in related photos, videos and other popular galleries

This has been a major collaborative effort and I hope you enjoy it.

Abraco,
bill

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

With the Fourth of July recently passed I know what you’re all thinking: what the hell is with the price of gas??!

However, a few of you might also be asking yourselves: what’s happening with Yahoo! Music?

This is a question I can answer.

This blog was started by Ian Rogers, the previous General Manager of Yahoo! Music, who recently left to become CEO of a startup, where we wish him the best of luck. Since his departure, we haven’t really been blogging much, which means we haven’t been communicating with you, our loyal readers.

Well, we’re going to change this and get back to blogging so we can let you know what we’re up to.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Michael Spiegelman, I’ve been at Yahoo! Music since December 2003 and I’m now heading up the Music group. It’s an interesting time to be in the digital music space, as old business models crumble and new models emerge. We’re doing our part to evolve the digital music experience and develop new ways to connect people to the music they love.

In February we announced that Yahoo! was acquiring a small company called FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes has a small web app that sits in your browser and lets you remote control music listening from services such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, Pandora, Last.fm and 25 other music players. The FoxyTunes team has now become an integrated part of our group (experiencing crazy culture shock along the way…ever try to find a kosher restaurant in Santa Monica?) and is working with our other engineering teams to integrate the FoxyTunes tools with other Yahoo! products.

We’ve also been having a lot of success with our Web Media Player (which internally we fondly call Goose), the brainchild of Lucas Gonze. Our Media Applications team has been building on Lucas’ great work to improve the player and put it in the hands of some of the top bloggers in the digital music space. You can now find it at these fine blogs:

Aurgasm
Aquarium Drunkard
Gorilla Vs Bear
Large Hearted Boy
Soul Sides

Speaking of blogs, our own Yahoo! Music Blogs, which we launched in November, are now drawing an audience of over 8 million unique users per month. Woo-hoo! Apparently, there might be something to this blogging thing after all.

On the Yahoo! Music site, we’ve been launching our new music videos section, video playlisting, blogs, charts and other features of our new platform internationally. I’m pleased to announce the launch of revamped sites in Canada, the UK, Spain, France and Germany, and also the launch of our brand-new site in Mexico. We’ll be re-launching our sites in Italy and Australia, as well as our Spanish-language site, in the next few weeks.

The final thing I wanted to talk about was how we’ll be embracing Yahoo!’s new strategy of openness. Jerry Yang and Sue Decker have talked a lot about how Yahoo!’s new mission is to become the starting point for great web experiences. We’re taking this to heart, and in the coming months you’ll see us opening Yahoo! Music up, so you’ll be able to find not just content from us, but also from other great services and sites.

Well, that’s all for now, but we’ll be blogging more frequently now to keep you up to date with our doings. As always, feel free to leave comments.

Until the next time,

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music

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

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