As many of you already know, we took a big step in March by moving from a pop-up video player to an embedded player. This new experience provides for more seamless playback and improved sharing features.

We’ve also introduced some other cool features and enhancements that I’d like to share with you.

Upgraded video quality:
We recently upgraded our encoding specifications and are now providing 16×9 format videos when available. These new settings look fantastic and scale very well for the ‘full screen’ mode. Here’s a capture of a new 16×9 video from the band Paramore.

Video stations:
We have a comprehensive offering of over 50 video stations that give users a one-click option to launch great laid back video experiences. These stations are editorially programmed in the same manner as their radio counterparts and include everything from Today’s Big Hits to Chill Out to 2008 Grammy Nominees. If users are more interested in new discoveries, they can easily browse all video titles in each of these stations and sort by most popular, alphabetically by artist, or by newest. We continue to offer the standard browsing menu including My Station, Top 100, New Videos, Recommended, Videos I’ve Rated, and Video Premieres.

Sharing:
The new share panel in the player enables users to easily send a link of the video, share via IM or email, or embed.

Playlists:
With the new embedded video experience, we introduced the ability for users to add videos to playlists without interrupting viewing. To date, our users have created millions of video playlists!

Catalog:
We remain focused on building the most comprehensive and highest quality music video catalog on the web as well as providing accurate data and category tags for every video in the catalog. Want to see more videos in the same category as the video you are currently watching? Simply click on any of the category links and they will take you to a page with all the videos in that category. It’s a very useful discovery tool.

Enjoy, and let us know what new music video features you want to see. More updates to come!

Thanks,

Steve C.
Yahoo! Music

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

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

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:

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

The last few weeks, I’ve been working on a very cool application for Facebook, called Yahoo! Music Videos. If you’re on Facebook, you can check out the public beta now.

If you’re not already on Facebook, check out Facebook! It’s kind of like MySpace, but not as ugly.

Our app is a mashup of sorts, which combines the personalization features of Facebook with the massive video library of Yahoo! Music. When you visit its page, it gets the music info from your Facebook profile and your friend’s profiles and finds a collection of music videos which match the names of the singers and bands you and your friends have listed. From those videos, you can then find videos of related artists, view them, and share them with your friends.

If you’re not interested in software development, you’ll probably find the rest of this pretty boring. Go watch a video!

* * *

Yahoo! is a very big company, and like most big companies it can be difficult to turn projects around quickly. Learning how to do rapid development in a company of this size has been a real eye opener for me.

This particular project was started about a month ago, when I received an email from Ian Rogers asking if anyone was interested in getting Yahoo! Music onto Facebook. Ian is the head of Yahoo! Music, and I’m pretty sure that without his annoying naggingpersistent encouragement during that first week, the project would still be in the planning stages.

I got involved (even though I was already pretty busy on other projects) because a Yahoo!/Facebook app would amount to a mashup, and I love making mashups. Mashups are challenging because they involve multiple colliding technologies. In this case, not only would we be combining the Facebook and Yahoo APIs, which are very different, but I would need to be working in both PHP and Flash Actionscript, and I’d need to do a little image rendering on the back-end. I had been hired by Yahoo! pretty much on the strength of the mashups I had created with Flickr, using those same technologies, so here was a chance to exercise those skills, but also to get to know a new platform I had little familiarity with.

By the following day, I had a basic “Hello World” style app running, using Facebook’s awesome F8 APIs. By the way, you can read more about Facebook’s development platform here.

Within a few days, I had received a hastily hand-drawn spec (I contributed to it by drawing a little stonehenge monolith in the corner, marked 18″), and I began a series of little experiments to see what was possible to do on Facebook. I found out, for example, that for the most part, I wouldn’t be able to use Javascript, which is normally available and makes it possible to do most of the cool AJAXy things web users have come to expect. On the plus side, I found that we could embed Flash movies into our Facebook app, and make use of an embedded video player that Yahoo! music was already preparing for another project. The video player wasn’t a perfect fit for facebook, but I saw that we could slightly tweak it to fit our needs. Scott Haynie, from our web services team, helped me identify a set of existing Yahoo! Music services that could power the app, allowing users to search for videos in various ways.

Two weeks later, our design folks had transformed the hand-drawn spec into a pretty ambitious multi-page full color print-out, and we had set a tentative (and insane) release date of June 30, but I hadn’t gotten much done on the actual app, and I was starting to get nervous. I sent out an email stating emphatically that we needed another developer to concentrate exclusively on our backend or video player needs if we were going to get the application out in time. As it turns out, I was wrong. We didn’t get that developer, but we did get the app out.

In retrospect, I think I was feeling the same angst that a child feels, when tasked with washing a sink full of dishes. There was a mountain of work in front of me, I pretty much knew how to do it, but I was overwhelmed by the size of the pile. I needed to dunk my hands in the water to get over that initial hump of inertia.

So when I was done kvetching I got to work, and cranked out the first version of what became our Facebook app over the weekend. The app didn’t adhere all that closely to our original spec, but it was usable and fun, and more importantly, it contained a feature-set that was doable in the time-frame we had to work with. In making the app, I omitted the features that would have required building a back-end database. At the same time, I added some “low hanging fruit” features that were cool (like “Video Dedications”), but not in the original spec. This is a good example where building a quick and dirty prototype becomes an essential part of the application design process. It made me, the programmer, much more invested in the design process, and enabled our designers to get their hands on a working app so that they weren’t working completely in a world of hypothetical constraints. Fortunately, our project manager, Michael Spiegelman, encouraged this method of working. If I had been required to stick to the spec more slavishly, we would have been in trouble.

Now, I wonder what would have happened if we had added that second developer I wanted to the project. I think its likely we wouldn’t have made our date – the additional manpower would have justified maintaining more of the original feature set, and made the project more complex.

Instead, working closely with our awesome UED folks, Ruth Kaufman and Lino Wiehen, we modified the spec to more closely match what I had actually made. We essentially threw away the full color print out, and went back to working with hand-drawn specs. In retrospect, I think this is the way to go. The full color print outs really aren’t needed until most of the functionality has been fleshed out in a working prototype. Ruth and Lino produced a beautiful visual design that retained most of the functionality that I had introduced, but used the visual grammar of their original specs. Their flexibility made it possible for us to bring the app to completion in the remaining two weeks.

The last two weeks have been a mad rush as we raced to complete the app by June 30th. Last night, June 29th, we finally gave it it’s first “push” into the world, and I’ve been proudly tracking it’s progress since.

The app is still a little rough around the edges (hence the word ‘beta’ at the top of the page), and we’re still tweaking it, but I’m pleased to say it’s a very compelling way to view videos!

I hope you like it!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! During those first two weeks, when I was still experimenting and procrastinating, I made a pretty cool mosaic of 3,600 of the artists on Yahoo! Music. Here it is.

Here’s the jumbo-sized version. Click on any of the artists in the image to view their page at Yahoo! Music.

Jim Bumgardner
Yahoo! Music

Hopefully you’ve seen our Get Your Freak On corner, in which you, dear music fan, submit video of yourself dancing, lip syncing, or just generally messing about to your favorite song and we edit it together into a hit video. We’ve done these videos with everyone from Shakira to Weird Al, and the results have been sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, but always popular.

We were aware the industry had taken notice, but now the LA Times has taken notice of the industry’s notice! Check out this LA Times article about the “‘Hips Don’t Lie’ Effect” in which they say Get Your Freak On “sent shock waves through the industry.” Congrats to the team for shocking the industry. Thanks Shamal for sending the link.

Hurry, I think today is the last day to submit yourself for the J-Lo video. Check out all the submissions as well as the completed videos in the archive while you’re there.

GYFO,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

Hi Everyone:

Yahoo! Music has released a new music video player and it’s hot like Spring Break Daytona 2007. With the new player we are giving you control of your video experience, plus higher quality videos across both Mac and Windows, Firefox included. Try out these new features:

• When you watch a video in the new player, you will see a list of videos directly to the right of the video screen. This is the lineup of videos that will play next. If you like the videos in your lineup just sit back and enjoy the show. If you don’t like some of the videos, just click the ‘X’ button next to the video you want to remove, and it will delete it from your lineup.
• Also, you can finally browse more videos to play without leaving the comfort of the video player. Directly below the video, you will see a list of channels such as “Recommended,” “New,” “Top 100” etc. If you see any videos that you like from these channels you can watch them right away by clicking the play button, or you can add them to play next by clicking on the + Lineup button.
• If you don’t see the video you are looking for within the channels, you can also use the search box at the bottom right of the player. Perfect for when you want to interrupt that J-Lo video and switch over to nice-yet-obscure joints from Abstract Rude or maybe Capleton.
• Finally, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve finally joined the 21st century and our video player serves OS X and Firefox. Not only that, but we’ve raised the quality to 700kbps for all users.

We are still working out a few of the kinks, but please feel free to send us any feedback.

Also, for more information you can check out our complete tutorial.

Remember to rate artists and videos so we can continue to improve your recommendations.

There is a lot more to come. Stay tuned.

Brian Marshall
Yahoo! Music

Today Yahoo! released Yahoo! Video, a great new way to find, discover, and share videos. Kudos to my man Ethan and the crack team of engineers who built it — I gotta admit, it’s pretty dope.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What’s different about Yahoo! Video? I can already go to YouTube and iFilm to find stupid videos to email to my friends when I’m bored at work.” Well, here are a few reasons to check it out:

• Yahoo! Video helps you to find videos from across the web as well as videos that people have uploaded themselves, one of the only sites that combines the best of both worlds. It’s got the greatest selection of videos around. For example, you can find almost 10,000 music videos from Yahoo! Music in Yahoo! Video. That’s ten thousand music videos from artists both big and small. Just search for one of your favorite bands, or check out this page to see all of our videos in their glory. There are also videos from sites like AOL, YouTube and Grouper if for some reason you want videos from sites other than Yahoo! Music (I can’t think of why you would, but hey, you never know).
• You can easily keep track of the videos you like by saving them as bookmarks in an RSS reader, a great tool for storing videos that you can access from any computer and any browser (previously I said this was done through My Web, but it’s actually done through the Yahoo! Video RSS reader, and you can export a video channel to your own RSS reader if you’re so inclined. My Web is still a great tool though). Even better, you can subscribe to a feed from any source to keep up with all the new videos coming in from your favorite sites. Check out the feed of Yahoo! Music videos here.
• For all you amateur filmmakers and videographers, you can upload your own content and let millions of Yahoo! users watch it. That’s right, you too can post that video footage of your cat skateboarding or your friend getting hit (in the face) with a football. So go ahead, share those great video clips with the world!

Here in the Yahoo! Music offices, we’re most excited that the new Yahoo! Video gives us another way to help people find great music videos. So take a look, subscribe to Yahoo! Music in Yahoo! Video, poke around and watch some videos. And be sure to check out
the Video team’s blog for an on-going look at the product and how it can help the video enthusiast community.

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music