Continuing the torrential pace of new software, we have released a playlist page, a new player for thirty-second samples, and the ability to play subscription tracks in the browser. All of this software is somewhat beta.
Until a few weeks ago, when you opened a playlist created in in the browser you were likely to get a nearly-blank white page that looked like an error message. No more. You will now see a full-featured module which includes the ability to play tracks and to comment on playlists. You can browse playlists by creator and you can browse playlists which a person has commented on, so there is a content-focused social network.
Play buttons will give you full songs if you are a subscriber, and 30-second samples otherwise. The player is now rendered in the page rather than in a pop-up window.
Here are some playlists to help you get started:
by is, I think, about exploring fresh releases, and has tunes from Dizzee Rascal, Pharoahe Monch, Bad Brains, and Betty Davis.
playlist is instrumental soul jams.
by is music for his baby daughter. This is a fun theme, and if you have another playlist like it you might want to leave a note on Adam’s playlist.
by Steve Raymond is a playable version of .
playlist by the great . See also his about this playlist.
by . See also his about this playlist.
We hope you’ll dig it.
Release notes
There isn’t yet a convenient way to look up a playlist URL or to your find your own playlists in the browser. If you have Yahoo! Music Jukebox you can open it up, navigating to a playlist, copy the link to the clipboard, then go to a browser and open that link. In the browser you can submit a comment on a playlist, then click on the link to your playlists in the posted comment.
Yahoo! Music Unlimited playback only works in Internet Explorer on Windows. In Firefox you can either use the plugin or wait for our own plugin to be ready.
Many alpha users had to upgrade or rebuild their Windows DRM setup.
Sample playback works on the Mac if you have installed. We could only deliver subscription tracks if Windows DRM was supported, which it isn’t, so this is blocked on the same old same old. About Linux support, we’ll do samples if we can find a reliable way to do WMA in the browser.
The new player is only used in the playlist pages for now. We will hook it up to the rest of the new pages soon.
Another week, another launch of new features here at Yahoo! Music. This time, we’ve revamped our Music Videos Section. If you go to 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.
, 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!
, showing what you all have played the most each week, every week.
, giving y’all a way to play great videos in your favorite genres with one click of the mouse.
, 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!
Many of you may have noticed that our beloved , though rich in content, has become a bit outdated in look and feel. Ok, I’ll admit it: the site looks like something out of 2001. That’s because we haven’t changed it much since, well, 2001.
We’ve finally decided to change that. Today we’re launching our , with a new feature set that we hope you’ll love as much as we do. Some of the new goodies include:
What’s New Today: the top module on the page will bring you the best picks from our editorial team, served up twice daily. Ranging from the popular to the brand new and from beloved to the bizarre, we’ll be showcasing the most interesting stuff the Music world has to offer.
: If you’re like me and the editorial selections will seldom appeal to your off-beat tastes (ok, Lyndsey has promised to feature the new Chemical Brothers album this week! It’s pretty great, I highly recommend it), never fear! One of the most exciting features in my opinion is the new Personalized Recommendations module, which will provide recommendations of music videos, songs, albums and artists to check out, all based on your ratings. If you haven’t rated any music with us, now would be a great time to start.
: Everyone wants to know what’s popular, right? We’ve expanded our charts to include songs and albums, in addition to videos. If you click on ‘View All Charts’, you can drill down and see charts by genre, so you can dig in and check out the most popular indie rock songs, jazz albums or blues videos (yes, we really do have blues videos. Who knew?!)
: We’re marching boldly into 2006 by embracing this whole blogging thing. I think it might be big. Seriously, I’m very excited that our editorial team has pulled together some great writers who will be taking on different beats, talking about everything from the week’s best new releases to the hip-hop scene to music from your favorite reality TV shows. We’re going to be adding more bloggers in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Concerts: Ok, this is one of my personal favorites. We’ve done a mashup with , a user-generated events site that Yahoo! owns, to bring you listings of concerts happening in your local area. also includes a handy map. If you know a show is happening but can’t find it, just go to and add it.
My Radio: This is a preview of things to come, but we’ll be giving you persistent access to your personalized radio station throughout the new pages. This is something we’ll be rolling out across the rest of the site.
This re-launch of our new homepage is only the first step in our efforts to bring our site up to date and provide you with a much better user experience. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be revamping our entire site, adding new features, changing the look & feel, improving performance and adding fresh content. We hope you like it. If you want to make sure you see the brand new Homepage, just go to music.yahoo.com/beta. Please check it out and click on the ‘feedback’ link on the page to send us your thoughts. We’d love to hear from you.
One more thing: I want to publicly thank our very talented design, development and QA teams who make this all possible. It’s really a pleasure to work with smart, creative, energetic and passionate people. You guys really make it all possible. Thank you.
A big “thank you” to all concerned music lovers and fans who supported , and rallied to .
On Friday at a House Energy and Commerce Committee roundtable hosted by Chairman Ed Markey (D-MA) and attended by seven additional Members of Congress, SoundExchange announced an offer to cap the $500 per channel minimum fee exacted on Webcasters at $50,000 annually through 2010, for the full length of the term. DiMA, the trade organization that represents Yahoo! Music and other webcasters, has accepted the offer. With the minimum fee issue off the table, we are hopeful that we can negotiate a fair royalty rate with SoundExchange that will support a sustainable business environment for Internet radio.
We hope there will be more good news to come shortly.
Put down that watermelon for a second, I’ve got a small Yahoo! Music Jukebox update for you. Jukebox version 2.2 is now available. The big deal in this release is a completely overhauled online interface for . Right away you may notice a new front page for Unlimited that should load a lot faster, larger images on artist pages, and an overall palette that’s a little easier on the eyes. This interface has been re-done almost from scratch to be quicker and more reliable.
Beneath the shiny new surface, though, are some helpful additions in the right-click menu within Unlimited that hopefully make life easier for music lovers:
Auto–Play: Turn this on and turn off the hassle of constantly having to add music to yourqueue. When the list of music in “Now Playing” is over, we’ll keep playing music from Yahoo! Music Unlimited similar to what you were listening to. It’s great for parties, like the July 4th bash you should be at right now (in the U.S. at least). You or your friends can add a few tracks you specifically want to hear, and let us handle the rest.
Recent Searches: We remember the last 20 searches that you’ve done in Unlimited.
Find Other Versions: Navigate to a song page. If it’s not quite the right performance of the song that you were looking for, right-click and select “Find Other Versions” and we’ll automatically search for similar songs and hopefully get you to what you’re looking for.
Under the hood, we’ve also made some performance tweaks. The greatest hits among those are:
• We’ve improved handling of album art lookups for local MP3 tracks
• Fixed a memory leak that would spring when YMJ was playing for a very long time (Goes well with Auto-Play)
• Jukebox 2.2 should now install and run on 64-bit Vista systems (fingers crossed)
• My personal favorite long-term nagging issue: When the player is maximized the close gadget X is now clickable all the way up to the upper right corner of the screen. That’s usability progress!
• Over 100 other various quality fixes
We hope you enjoy these latest enhancements and encourage your on these products. Now get back to that barbecue. It’s time to flip those burgers.
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 now.
If you’re not already on 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 . 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.
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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 .
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.
Click on any of the artists in the image to view their page at Yahoo! Music.
Put down that watermelon for a second, I’ve got a small Yahoo! Music Jukebox update for you. Jukebox version 2.2 is now available. The big deal in this release is a completely overhauled online interface for . Right away you may notice a new front page for Unlimited that should load a lot faster, larger images on artist pages, and an overall palette that’s a little easier on the eyes. This interface has been re-done almost from scratch to be quicker and more reliable.