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.
]]>The changes that users will notice the most have to do with visible behaviors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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:
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
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:
Ciara f/Chamillionaire, “Get Up”
Evanescence, “Call Me When You’re Sober”
Justin Timberlake, “What Goes Around…Comes Around”
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.
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A monumental shift in the music industry has been happening in the last few years. Yesterday’s announcement by Billboard to integrate the radio and video spins on Yahoo! Music into the Billboard Hot 100 chart marks the beginning of a new era. As of next week, the combined radio and video spins from Yahoo! Music and AOL will define 5% of the Hot 100 chart. For many years, only FM spins and CD sales numbers made up the chart. In 2005, Billboard started to include digital downloads as well. With next week’s changes, digital downloads will affect the Hot 100 chart more, increasing to 40% while physical CD single sales decrease to less than 1% (FM airplay makes up the remaining 55%). This means that for many songs/videos you hear/watch, your musical experience is four times more important on the biggest chart in the music industry than all of the CDs sold in the US (four times more because our spins are so much greater than AOL’s, we’ll have 4% of the chart in many cases).
This chart integration formally recognizes what’s been happening for years; people like you are discovering bands and consuming your favorite music online and through Internet-connected players. Think of the music industry as the line between a music fan and an artist. That line used to be very long and now is just two points: you and the artist. Sites like ours connect you directly to them. When an artist sends us a song or video for you to watch and experience their art without having an “in” in the music industry, you can now help get their song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart by watching their video or rating their song high so that it plays more in your customized LAUNCHcast station or more in stations you see on the station guide. This is a massive change in the business and affects how the power paradigm has been shifting, giving music fans more direct power. Now that there are thousands of radio and video outlets across the web and monsters like us music fanatics at Yahoo! Music (we play 4 BILLION music videos each year), ALL artists and ALL labels can get their music played and see the passion of their fans directly result in a spot on the most-coveted chart in the biz.
Thanks and keep watching/listening.
John Lenac
Yahoo! Music
Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls” was #1 on both Yahoo! Music and Billboard’s Hot 100 the first week of this updated chart:
Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver
Slow and Low, live in Kansas City
Ricky’s Theme, also from Denver
Flute Loop, recorded live in Chicago