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

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

Get the full scoop over at the FoxyTunes blog.

Download FoxyTunes for Firefox

Yahoo! Music is Hiring!

Would you like to work on one of the largest music destinations on the Web and help us build new and innovative music services for millions of users all over the world? Yahoo! Music is looking for rock-star engineers for its Front End Web Development team in Santa Monica, California. If you’re really good with PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, have great design and engineering skills and are exited by working with a talented team on killer user experiences please consider applying!

More info about this position and how to apply can be found here.

Do you have an incredible passion for music and spend most of your time online? Yahoo! Music is also looking for a talented, initiative-oriented, creative, music programmer for daily video/radio programming and site publishing. The position would be responsible for programming and maintaining new and catalog music/videos, securing exclusive content, increasing user engagement by helping to conceptualize and publish amazing music experiences and communicating regularly with record labels and various content partners.

More info about this position and how to apply can be found here.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

-Alex Sirota, Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music iPhone App Powered by CBS RADIO

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! Music

Control your YouTube with FoxyTunes

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

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

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

Thanks,

Stephen Garcia

Yahoo! Music

Easy access to Music data through YQL

Hey all,

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy, and let us know what you think.

Thanks,

Stephen Garcia

Yahoo! Music

Yahoo! Music Relaunch

Hey all,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Spiegelman
General Manager
Yahoo! Music

The New LAUNCHcast Radio Is Here!

Hi all,

We’re proud to announce that the new LAUNCHcast powered by CBS Radio is now live! Check it out here: http://new.music.yahoo.com/launchcast.


Or just open up Yahoo! Instant Messenger and start the LAUNCHcast plug-in.



For the first time in Yahoo! Music history, you can now listen to LAUNCHcast on Firefox and on a Mac! The Yahoo! Music team is still programming all your favorite stations and now you can also choose from a variety of music, sports, news and talk programming from CBS Radio’s station line-up. We’re very excited about our partnership with CBS and will continue to work together to make LAUNCHcast even better, so stay tuned.

In addition to the new LAUNCHcast Radio, we also released a new page where you can see all of the songs you’ve rated on Yahoo! Music. Check it out here. You can also play many of your songs on-demand thanks to our partnership with Rhapsody.



We know a lot of you were fans of your customized My Station, and while My Station is no longer available, we are still committed to creating a personalized experience for you on Yahoo! Music (Read Michael’s post for the rationale behind the discontinuation of customized radio). Your ratings will still be used to power the recommendations provided to you on our site. You can play your recommendations on-demand from our recommendations page.



We also offer a personalized music video station that is based on your ratings as well. Check out your video station here.



Look for the “My Music” tab in the main navigation bar on Yahoo! Music to see all the stuff related to your music preferences.



We will continue to work on new features that take advantage of your ratings so we encourage you to keep rating music to personalize our site to your unique musical tastes. Please note, the songs you rate in the new LAUNCHcast players are not saved to your Yahoo! Music profile. We’ll be working with CBS to incorporate radio ratings from the new player into your profile in the future.

That’s it for now. Please check out our frequently asked questions for additional information about the new LAUNCHcast service. If you have questions about the new player, check out our help page here.

Thanks
–Dave
Yahoo! Music

FoxyTunes for Firefox v3.5 Beta

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

Get FoxyTunes for Firefox v3.5 Beta.

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

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

Delicious Music. Play your bookmarks.

We’re very excited to announce that FoxyPlayer is now part of the largest social bookmarking site in the world, Delicious.

Our good friends at Delicious are providing a great place to store everything you find on the Internet and have long been committed to supporting mp3 playback. The introduction of Yahoo! Music’s FoxyPlayer extends the playback experience by allowing continuous play of multiple bookmarks as one big playlist, support for a plethora of file types, and links to get more information about the currently playing track.

To try this out, you can filter by the “system:media:audio” tag, then filter further by the type of media you’d like to hear – like the name of the artist, genre etc. The results can include podcasts, mp3, music, and a whole host of other file types. Now you can play all them all using the FoxyPlayer!

By the way, if you like to listen to music while you surf, you can launch FoxyPlayer on Delicious and control it with FoxyTunes while surfing in other tabs.

Here are a few examples of ways to listen:

http://delicious.com/tag/system:filetype:mp3+jazz+free
http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:audio+npr
http://delicious.com/tag/system:media:audio+podcast

Now it’s time to sit back, relax, and listen to your bookmarks.

Hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

-Stephen Garcia

LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS

Hey everyone,

Today Yahoo! Music made a big announcement: we’ll be partnering with CBS Radio to offer a jointly operated radio service to our users, which will be called LAUNCHcast Radio powered by CBS.

This will replace our existing service by moving radio to the CBS Interactive platform, with CBS providing the content, radio player and advertising. Our content team will continue to program our wide array of 150 radio stations using the CBS programming tools.

Though we’re announcing this today, the first release will take place on Feb. 12th, 2009, with subsequent releases afterwards to add features and functionality.

I’d like to walk you all through the rationale for this and then talk through the changes to the product.

In the past year and a half, the cost of operating Internet radio has changed drastically. There have been a series of court decisions, one in March of 2007 and one in April of 2008 that greatly increased the cost of Internet radio, to the point where we would be losing a lot of money if we continued to operate LAUNCHcast in its current form next year.

Yahoo! has never made a lot of money from Internet radio: it’s generally been a consumer feature and not a big profit center. However, we really couldn’t afford to pay the new rates, so we therefore faced a choice: either cripple the product to greatly reduce listenership, or find a partner with strengths in radio and different economics.

CBS Radio and Yahoo! started a discussion about the future of web radio several months ago. At the time, we were very impressed by their platform. CBS has a long tradition in the radio space, and has recently invested heavily in developing a great platform for the delivery of Internet radio. They’ve improved their offering by adding Last.fm and adding it to their family of companies.

The most critical part of our discussion was to ensure that any potential partner was committed to Internet radio and its users. CBS clearly has that commitment and is in it for the long haul.

CBS also has a great understanding of how to develop an excellent radio product. They’ve taken their deep knowledge of radio and built a platform that enables sophisticated programming, and through Last.fm they have access to great personalization technology.

So how will this affect users of LAUNCHcast Radio? When we flip the switch in February, here’s what you’ll see change:
- For the first time, the new ‘LAUNCHcast powered by CBS’ player will work on Firefox and on Macs, bringing LAUNCHcast radio to all of you who don’t use Internet Explorer. Yes, this is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, and it’s finally here.
- We’ll keep programming 150 radio stations for your enjoyment. You may see the content change slightly as we adjust to the new tools and catalog, but for the most part we’ll be offering the same radio stations, which will be programmed by our team here at Yahoo! Music using the CBS tools. All of these stations will now be free.
- We’ll continue to offer artist fan radio, which plays music related to an artist that you select. This will be offered as part of the redesigned artist pages we’ll be launching early next year.
- We’re going to be phasing out LAUNCHcast Plus. For all of you subscribers, we’ll be offering refunds for the remaining length of your subscription when we make the change on February 12. We will be making all subscription stations absolutely free, and will offer all audio at the higher quality bitrate.
- The major change you’ll see is that our beloved customized LAUNCHcast Radio will be going away. We spent a long time trying to figure out how to get this to work with the CBS platform, but unfortunately it wasn’t technically feasible. I understand that many of you have invested long hours in building your radio station, but the fact is that due to the increasing rates, we can’t continue to offer this service. Your ratings will continue to be accessible and those ratings will power recommendations of songs and music videos on our homepage, as well as your personalized music video station. We’ll also be introducing some social functionality in the next few weeks which will allow you to use your ratings to share music with friends across Yahoo!. Next year, we’ll be collaborating with CBS and Last.fm to redesign a set of personalized functionality for our site, as it’s something we certainly view as very important.

So that’s what we’re up to. Please feel free to post questions in the comments or refer to our FAQs for more info. We’ll try to answer all the questions as best we can.

Thanks,

Michael Spiegelman
General Manager, Yahoo! Music