[Reposted from http://www.krazydad.com/blog/]

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

Apologies to anyone who was hoping to listen to free LAUNCHcast today. We’re shutting down the Internet’s #1 radio service for the day to draw attention to the outrageous rates recently set by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C.. We are doing so alongside thousands of webcasters including Pandora, MTV, Real/Rhapsody, WXPN.com, KCRW.com, and many many others. For a more complete list, check Kurt Hanson’s site, RAIN. AOL and Clear Channel stand out as the only two online broadcasters too corporate to show their solidarity (sorry, Lisa ). Hopefully you’ll be seeing lots about today’s protest in the press, and most importantly I hope you’ll let your representatives in Washington know how you feel. Please visit the SaveNetRadio.org site where they make this easy for you. We need your help between now and July 15th when the first payments are due under the new royalty rates.

The situation webcasters are in is simple: the new royalty rates are more than the revenues anyone can hope to make from related advertising. In other words, we all lose money on Internet radio starting July 15th. Yahoo! has no intention of operating LAUNCHcast radio as a loss-leader. This senseless rate hike needs to be changed or our business will have to. And unfortunately the way we’d have to change our business would end up curtailing the great diversity that makes Internet radio uniquely compelling. I think we’d all be terribly sad to see Internet radio start to sound more like terrestrial radio with its limited number of stations playing a small number of songs. The irony that the new rates force webcasters to either go out of business or sound more like terrestrial radio, which pays no similar royalties, is rich.

Here are a few myths which the industry needs to get its head around:

Myth: Yahoo! (and other big Webcasters) can “afford” these rates.
Fact: LAUNCHcast loses money under these rates, Yahoo! has no appetite to run radio as a loss-leader.

Myth: All Internet radio should be for-pay subscription.
Fact: Less than 3% of our radio listeners are subscribers. Subscription is a feature for users who would prefer no interruptions, not an interesting business for anyone.

Myth: Radio drives tons of users into Yahoo! and therefore Yahoo! will operate radio at a deficit.
Fact: Not only is this a terrible way to structure an Internet business ecosystem so that it grows, it’s just not true. We’re fortunate to be a part of Yahoo!, the most visited network on the Internet, and the traffic the network drives to us is what makes us so popular. Not vice versa.

But for those who want a little more color in the story, I thought I’d share a few blips from the last three months of my life as I have come fully up to speed on this issue, visited Washington, met with artists, labels, and the RIAA, and worked with many others to find a solution. It’s been quite an education for me.

I’ve worked at Yahoo! Music for three and a half years (since they purchased my small company, Mediacode in December of 2003), but have only been the General Manager since the beginning of March. I took the reigns the same week the CRB ruling was handed down. That first week Bob Roback called me in to a meeting where I was introduced to Ken Steinthal, the lawyer who handled the case for the webcasters. Ken was shouting and cursing in disbelief on a conference call including AOL, MTV, Pandora, Live365, and others. When we hung up I stated the obvious to Bob: “I guess the decision wasn’t advantageous to us.” “It’s impossible to imagine a worse outcome,” he replied. Welcome to your new gig, kid, I thought.

I quickly came up to speed with the help of many: Bob and Ken (mentioned above), Dina Hellerstein, Jeff Mickeal, and Jamie Hedlund from Yahoo!, and Jon Potter from the industry group DiMA. The basics are simple: you just need to look at the balance sheet to see the business losing more and more money each year as the rates increase faster than the radio ad market does. But coming in late and having not been involved in the litigation, it’s impossible not to continue to ask yourself, “Why? How did we get here? How does this happen?” The answer is unfortunately painfully simple: we’re still in a crossroads where old businesses and policy makers simply don’t understand or believe the realities of a new and growing business.

Here’s what happened, as simply as I can tell the story:

• Sound Exchange (the organization which represents the copyright holders and administers the payments) and Webcasters can’t agree on a royalty rate.
• The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) is formed by Congress, a process is established, and a standard is established. The process is reasonable enough, the standard is “willing buyer / willing seller” and not liked by the Webcasters as it is a more stringent standard than terrestrial and satellite rates were determined by.
• The CRB process begins, both sides spend millions of dollars on the litigation.
• During the litigation, the CRB sees financial information from both sides, but one side never sees the other’s complete testimony as much of it is redacted so confidential information is not shared with potential partners and competitors.
• 18 months later a decision is handed down which is incredibly unfavorable to the Webcasters and includes a footnote saying the CRB couldn’t be bothered with “inefficient” businesses which aren’t able to cover the rates. In addition to tripling the per-song rate, broadcasters are no longer able to account by the “Average Tuning Hour” (ATH, the absence of which sends the costs higher), and there is a $500 “per station minimum” administrative fee that’s completely out of step with the reality of technologically-advanced stations like LAUNCHcast, Pandora, and Rhapsody where there is a literally unlimited number of potential “stations”. “Willing buyer / willing seller” proves to be the joke the Webcasters knew it to be as there is only one seller (Sound Exchange) and there aren’t any buyers at the decided rates. The only good news is that Sound Exchange won too big, so big a big spotlight would soon shine on the decision as protests like today’s call attention to the issue.
• Webcasters ask for a clarification on some of the more ridiculous parts of the decision. Clarification denied.
• Sound Exchange issues press releases which spin the truth wildly, including this one which talks about how Yahoo!, Clear Channel, and Microsoft are trying to short change artists, neglecting to mention that Microsoft got out of the Internet Radio business YEARS ago because the RATES WERE TOO HIGH. Thankfully, no one buys their story.
• Webcasters form SaveNetRadio.org, Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Donald Manzullo (R-IL) introduce the Internet Radio Equality Act, and Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) introduce the Internet Radio Equality Act. Co-sponsors sign on in numbers beyond webcasters’ expectations.
• Webcasters file an appeal, and are currently crossing their fingers hoping it’s granted in advance of the July 15th “pay up” date.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with Jon Simson and Michael Huppe from Sound Exchange. They’re good people, by all accounts, and I can only imagine that they believe in the position they’ve staked out in the press, that the CRB saw the details of our business and chose a rate which we could afford. If only. Unfortunately the CRB made a mistake, handed Sound Exchange a loaded gun, and gave them the option to shoot Internet radio dead. How the CRB came from the testimony presented to this outcome is a complete mystery to everyone involved. I’m guessing Sound Exchange is nearly as puzzled as we are at this point.

I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting with our representatives in Congress and understanding their position. Congress doesn’t like to set rates, and I think we’d all agree that we’d prefer they didn’t micro-muck with the economy at this level. Instead, they set up a process and a standard, we all went through the process, and they’d like to think the outcome served the needs of the people. Our continued protest just sounds like “wah! the rates are too high! wah!”, which they’re sick of hearing and I don’t blame them. So we’ve been working hard to show them that the conversation here isn’t just “hey, we aren’t making as much money as we used to” but really “um, we are losing a lot of money on Internet radio, and we’re going to have to change our offering in such a way that it’s going to lose a lot of its great diversity of programming at the very least or that it’ll go away entirely at the very worst.” But it’s a tough slog and has taken a lot of convincing.

Finally, the elephant in the room is that while they’re asking Internet radio to pay more than 100% of revenue in royalty fees, satellite radio pays about 7% of revenue and terrestrial radio pays 0%. Killing the newest, most diverse, with the most growth potential, is asinine for all involved.

I’d like to think we’re making progress, though. Please do your part and write or call your representatives in Washington and let them know what you think of the above process and outcome. With your help, we can put Humpty back together.

Tune in to KCRW.org anytime on Tuesday, June 26th, they will be looping an hour long radio program where Webcasters discuss the specifics of their situation.

Thanks for reading and your support.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

We have partnered once again with long time friends Pepsi Co. to help deliver the Mountain Dew ‘Transform Your Summer’ sweepstakes.  I’ll let an excerpt from the official press release best explain what’s going on:

Consumers can enter the “Transform Your Summer” sweepstakes online at http://www.transformyoursummer.com. Thousands of prizes will be given away each day and consumers will be able to choose the prize they would like the chance to win by entering the daily drawing of their choice. There will be several daily drawings each offering a different prize. The “Transform Your Summer” prizes include the Ultimate Gaming Package (Xbox 360, Panasonic 42″ Plasma HDTV, games and accessories), trips to major sporting events, vacation packages and many other items. In addition, a limited-edition Pepsi(TM) Optimus Prime(R) collectible truck figure will be available as part of the promotion.Here’s how the “Transform Your Summer” sweepstakes works:

 1) Look for codes under the caps of specially-marked 20-ounce and 1-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, Pepsi and Sierra Mist

 2) Register at http://www.transformyoursummer.com

 3) Enter your code during the daily drawing featuring the prize you would like the chance to win.

As you can see, you get a chance to enter your code for a daily drawing with a limited amount of each of the prizes given out everyday.  But how best to decide what you bid for?  Do you go for the Ultimate Gaming Package with a smaller chance of winning, or do you go for the high probability of scoring a $2 Yahoo! Music Download Code?

The Yahoo! Music marketing department is here to help with this decision by taking a mathematical look at the matter.  We advise that you look at Expected Monetary Value of your code - weighing the value of the prize vs. the probability of winning that prize.  For example, Mountain Dew is giving away $100 prizes every day with a probability of winning at about 1%.  That would effectively make your code worth $1.  

With this in mind, we took a sample day and calculated the best value for your code.  The results, please..

6^th Place - Panasonic 42” HDTV — $0.36 value per code 5^th Place - XBOX 360 — $0.48 3^rd Place - Yahoo! Music $2 Download code — $1 3^rd Place - tie -  $100 cash — $1 2^nd Place - $25 cash — $1.85 1^st Place - Official Mountain Dew Hoodie — $4.45

Our initial thoughts based on these results:

 – Despite the results above, our official position is that you should take the $2 Yahoo! Music Download code because music is priceless and anything times priceless is priceless (except for maybe 0).

So go get yourself a ton of 20 ounce or 1 liter bottles of Mountain Dew, bid them all on the $25 prize, and become a Soda-Promo Entrepreneur.

60,000 albums are released yearly. How can any one break through the clutter to get noticed if you’re doing it independently? There are now hundreds of cable TV stations people can choose from. How can an unsigned artist even get to one of those for music placement? And how can I get big internet music players and cable channels to notice?

Well, the top internet music site and the top cable network are listening for new music. And we’re going to anoint the best with exposure that is unprecedented in the music business. Who are these power players? Well, Yahoo! Music is obviously one, I’m sure you already guessed. We just announced our partnership with USA Networks to find and break bands. Knowing the quality of the programming and the sheer millions of people who use each media outlet daily, we’re gonna do it.

Here’s how it works. Independent bands are submitting music for airplay on our #1 LAUNCHcast service by the vanload. It’s gotten so big in recent months that Will Abramson, our Assistant Music Director in charge of indie music, had to get his mailbox expanded to twice the size. I think the IT people are going to kill us as we keep expanding the maximum capacity of Outlook for him to handle the MP3 submissions. So we take those submissions and we add them to the LAUNCHcast player. Every last one of ‘em, even if it sometimes takes us a few weeks to do so. We then watch how you, the Yahoo! Music radio listener, likes the song. If you really like it, we send a copy to USA.

They listen and, if they know that the music would work in the promos or episodes for any of their big hits such as Monk or Psyche, they call us and say “Let’s go!” We then play the record in LAUNCHcast while they play it on the TV network at the same time. With all those ears hearing the music, big buzz ensues and the artist is on their way to big success.

As someone who’s worked closely with artists for many years, I’ve really gotta tell you about the secret sauce. The deals we’ll make are some of the most artist friendly I’ve ever seen. Spencer Proffer, who is running the venture for us and USA, has been in sync with us on ensuring that the artist is not tied to some horrible, onerous agreement. Listen to this. The artist retains the rights to their music. The artist is committed for a short period of time and if nothing happens they are free to go elsewhere. The artist retains creative control. Personally, I was thrilled to hear all those things as we put this together.

Who will the first artists be? We’re deciding now and we’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you’re a LAUNCHcast user, here’s another great reason to rate the music you hear. You could influence what gets on USA Networks and gets signed! For artists, send Will your music. He might keep Red Bull in business if he has to find the time to listen to it all, but he loves it and he’ll do it. For us? It’s just one more step in our continued support for music artists of all levels.

Jay Frank, Head of Programming & Label Relations
Yahoo! Music

Recently I made a mix for one of my friends who had just parted ways with her man. It was easy to create, although picking between Kelly Clarkson must haves was a bit of a challenge. Of course there is the ever powerful “Since U’ve Been Gone,” except not a lot of time had passed. Then there was my favorite “Low,” as well as “Walk Away,” and “Because of You.” Once I heard “Never Again” there was no question it had to be on there.

Remember the first time you heard Jagged Little Pill by Alanis? Ouch. Then she went and got all happy on us. Kelly Clarkson, on the other hand, proves you can be a positive person, but that doesn’t mean rolling over when you get burned.

Now it’s your turn to show your inner Kelly. We’ve just launched our 10th Fans-Only video, giving you your chance to show Kelly how you work it to “Never Again”. Check out the special message from KC herself, and send us your video!

See ya!
Colleen
Yahoo! Music

There continues to be a lot of interest in the Sansa Connect portable player (SanDisk Connect Does Stuff You Wish Apple’s iPod Would) that we released this month with our partners SanDisk and Zing. We’re glad that the product has created some excitement for what’s next in the digital music - namely access to your music wherever and whenever with a payment model that maximizes your ability to rock out. We agree that we are turning it up to ELEVEN.

The biggest ask we’ve seen from reviewers and early customers is to be able to search the YMU catalog directly from the device. We hear you, its coming. Its actually not a trivial feature to “get right” from a usability standpoint - how do you find an artist or track you are looking for (out of a catalog of over TWO MILLION tracks) on an itty-bitty screen with no keyboard or mouse? So rather than bringing a frustrating product to market we decided to KISS (Keep it simple stupid) and release the product with its current rich feature set.

There is a reason why we felt we could make that decision: you don’t need to be able to search for specific artists, albums, or tracks to fill the device up with great music that you love - which is, after all, the goal.

You just think you do cause thats how you’ve always done it, until now.

It’s MUCH easier and arguably more entertaining to use Yahoo’s recommendation engine and the device’s mixlisting capabilities to fill the device up. After you have created a half-dozen or so mixlists, the device will leverage the YMU subscription and its own Wifi capabilities to keep the device filled up with fresh content based on your personal preferences. Trust me, its amazing, and your boring old iPod will start seeming very dated (almost brickish) after the lightbulb goes on. We haven’t talked up the technology much until now cause its so mindblowing, and really only suited for power users like you. Here’s what you do:

1. Go to the Settings>Music&Mixes>Mixes&Recommendations menu and set to 50% of capacity.
2. Also set Autodelete to “ON” from the Settings>Music&Mixes>Auto-Delete menu
3. If you have time, its helpful to have identified some playlists on YMU that you really love and to have rated a reasonable amount of music. A couple of playlists that are working great for me are Like Ryan Adams and Mojo 70-71. But this step is totally optional because you can make mixlists off of particular songs, genres, etc.
4. Start creating mixlists from the Zing menu on the device.
5. Create 1 or 2 based on existing playlists by navigating to Get More Music > My Yahoo! Playlists. Highlight a playlist, press the Zing button and select “Make a mix like this”
6. Create a few based on a genre by navigating to Get More Music>Yahoo! Music Recommendations and drilling into the genre tree. Once you have a genre selected press the Zing button and select “Make a mix like this”. This will have the added benefit of having the seed artists filtered through your personal ratings.
7. Listen to a Launchcast station and when a song comes on that you like press the Zing button and “Create a mixlist based on this song”
8. Find some other ways to create mixlists.
9. Start listening to the mixlists (they are saved in your Music Library on the device)

What happens next? Well, the device is going to do everything it can to keep those mixlists fresh for you. After you have listened to the tracks in a mixlist it’s going start deleting tracks you’ve already listened to and putting new ones on there based on the mixlist criteria and your personalization preferences (based on ratings) as well as some fancy backend algorithms. As long as the device is fairly well charge its going to try to do this housekeeping whenever it notices a WiFi connection that works for it. Like when you are asleep. When you least expect it, expect it.

Creating and modifying mixlists is so easy (and the music is so good!) that if you are like me, this is primarily how you are going to choose what to listen to for your bike ride to work etc. Maximizes control and personalization with a minimum of keystrokes and fuss. We’re thinking features like this are the way people will to interact with music and contact on connected devices in The Future.
For now if you really really need to find a particular track or album you are going to have to do it the old fashioned way and drag it over from your PC. Or you can create a playlist and use the WiFi on the device to get it. And pretty soon you’ll wake up and the device will have updated the firmware over WiFi and you’ll be able to search the catalog in a form factor appropriate way. But I bet you don’t use that feature anywhere near as much as you use mixlists.

Steve Raymond
Yahoo! Entertainment

P.S. Check out Pogue’s comment at the end of this. He gets it. I can’t believe people write reviews of reviews. But I also couldn’t believe that people posted video of themselves opening a box.

P.P.S If you are a Connect User join this group.

My earliest Internet music experiences were sharing lyrics on Usenet. Check out this now-embarrassing post from 1992 in rec.music.funky where I’m trying to decode the lyrics to “A Year And A Day” from Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I can still remember sitting in my walk-in closet, typing on an amber-monitor 8088, transcribing the lyrics to Diamond Dogs and Young Americans only to send them to someone I didn’t know so he could edit and post on Usenet (where are you, man? I think I owe you a cassette of that bootleg with SRV).

Until today, lyrics to popular songs have not been available legally in any mass capacity. The highly fragmented music publishing industry (not record companies) owns the right to publish lyrics and has been very slow to pull together and bless a way of legally distributing them on the Internet. As a result, lyrics have been relegated to rogue sites riddled with popup ads, inconsistent formatting, and often incorrect transcriptions. Every year we at Yahoo! Music say, “This is the year we’re going to sit down with the publishers and figure out how to offer lyrics to our users!” Unfortunately it’s proven to be an incredibly daunting task and we haven’t been able to pull it off on our own.

Today, however, we’re proud to announce that Gracenote has pulled together a comprehensive, consistent, and legal lyrics repository which we have licensed and integrated into the Internet’s #1 music site, Music.Yahoo.com. Now lyrics take their rightful place next to artist bios, discographies, videos, and downloads. All free to you, dear music lover. So check out the lyrics to hits like I’m The One, Start!, Freewill, or even Michelle (that’s right, we have The Beatles).

Also be sure to check our fancy Lyric Search, where you can search for songs by lyric snippet. What was that song that went …? Yahoo! Music can tell you.

Finally, thinking about those early Usenet posts got me all nostalgic so I decided to call professional lyricist Mike D from Beastie Boys and talk about lyrics for a minute. Here’s a snippet of the conversation, where he chides me for not knowing the lyrics to Brass Monkey (when he didn’t know them either), explains how the need for lyrics was the start of Grand Royal Magazine, and tells us that the lyrics for their new record (which they just finished last week) were “effortless”:

Download here

When you think lyrics, think Yahoo! Music. Or Rakim. But mostly Yahoo! Music.

ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

By now you’ve likely heard the news about the Copyright Board’s ruling regarding net radio. Simply put, it approximately triples the amount paid to record labels via SoundExchange for streaming Internet radio over the next three years, changes the way the payments are computed (from what is called an “Aggregate Tuning Hour” basis to a straight “per play”), adds a confusing and onerous “per station minimum” fee with no maximum, and extends the new rates back to the beginning of 2006. Many small Webcasters won’t be able to afford this, and you can bet large Webcasters like us are all taking a hard look at the Internet radio business and our products to decide if it’s really worth the cost. Big companies might have more money, but they can’t stay in businesses where they don’t make any profit, a pretty simple business fact.

Compare the implications of this decision to terrestrial radio which pays NOTHING to SoundExchange, or even satellite radio which pays only 3-7% of their revenue to SoundExchange, and it’s hard not to be left scratching your head. The irony of all this, of course, is that this ruling will keep LAUNCHcast, Pandora, and the like out of your living room and push you toward FM, where the labels are paid zero. This decision cuts off a genuine future revenue stream before it has had a chance to grow.

It’s not just the Webcasters that will suffer. Higher costs, fewer Internet broadcasters and stations means less diversity overall, and less opportunity for the unlimited spectrum of Internet radio to become a discovery tool for curious listeners and a launching platform for smaller artists. Internet radio features thousands of channels in the narrowest of genres as well as personalized services (LAUNCHcast) and recommendation systems (Pandora), while FM radio (where it still plays music) plays the same songs over and over and the total number of satellite channels is less than five hundred. I am a satellite radio subscriber and can honestly say it doesn’t even come close to representing the diversity I get from my personal LAUNCHcast station. Listeners and artists ultimately lose if this infinite spectrum of music choice evaporates or even shrinks to just a few players. The implications for innovation in the space are catastrophic.

Which is why we are asking you to take action RIGHT NOW. We are supporting DIMA (a trade organization representing Yahoo!, AOL, MTV, Pandora, Real, Live365, and many others) and the SAVE NET RADIO campaign on this issue. Please take five minutes right now to visit SaveNetRadio.org, let your representatives know how you feel about this issue, send this post and these links to a friend, and put a link to SaveNetRadio.org on your blog, MySpace page, or site. We are on a very tight timetable to get our voices heard in Washington and legislation introduced before May 15th when the first payment is due under this new ruling. We need your help in making sure Congress is paying attention to this issue.

Thanks for your understanding and support,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

It’s with great pride I announce the release of the SanDisk Sansa Connect, the new Wifi-enabled portable MP3 player set to free you from the USB cable chaining you to your PC, allowing you to listen to personalized radio, download music, share music with friends over Yahoo! Messenger, and view photos from Flickr, all direct over any Wifi network. Here are a few of the features not shared by either iPod or Zune:

• Personalized streaming LAUNCHcast radio
• Unlimited music downloads for $12/month direct over Wifi from Yahoo! Music Unlimited
• Dynamically updated “mix lists”
• Share music recommendations with friends via Yahoo! Messenger (your friend doesn’t even need the Sansa Connect)
• Photos from Flickr

It’s pretty fresh if I do say so myself, but why trust me? Here’s what Engadget had to say after spending a day with the device:

The Connect is tied to Yahoo! Music Unlimited for its subscription download model and streaming radio, and we’ve gotta say, a WiFi DAP really brings the model into its own.

Hells yeah. But they aren’t the only ones. Gadgetaholic liked it, too:

Sandisk has another winner here; I have no doubt. I am thoroughly impressed with the features available on this little device. Once you hooked this player up to your wifi network, it is almost impossible to put it down. This is what the Zune should have been.

You said it, homey. I also wanted to give a special shout out to my man Chris Leckness from Mobility Site for his very informative (and complimentary) unboxing and initial walk-through videos. Thanks, yo.

For me personally, the SanDisk Connect has put me in a completely different mode of portable music listening and discovery. I didn’t even connect mine to a computer for a week. I fired it up, started listening to personalized LAUNCHcast, and as songs I loved would play I’d grab the whole album. Then it was time to leave the house so I walked out the door and into the car, connected it to the line-in, and backed out of the driveway. The device elegantly said, “um, lost the connection to Wifi, dude”, so I flipped over into “My Library” and hit “Shuffle All” to start listening to the many songs I’d downloaded. Then when I got home the device was smart enough to wake up, realize there was Wifi available again, and restart my downloads. Simple and genius management of limited connectivity.

But there’s so much more. The Sansa Connect really underscores Yahoo! Music’s strengths and future direction, showing that we’re not just a way to get your music, but a set of services you use to manage your music experience across multiple endpoints. When you add songs to your library on the Sansa Connect, you’re also adding to your library on our servers and in Yahoo! Music Jukebox. The playlists you create in Yahoo! Music Jukebox show up on the Sansa Connect. When you rate songs on the Sansa Connect, the ratings will impact your LAUNCHcast station when you’re listening in the Web. The Sansa Connect is not an island, it’s part of your holistic Yahoo! Music experience. Yahoo! Music knows your music preferences, and helps you take them anywhere. Invest now, much more to come.

And of course you get other great Yahoo! features such as music sharing via Messenger and photos via Flickr. Can Rhapsody or Napster give you that? Thought not. How about Zune or iPod? Neither can give you unlimited music for one low price and neither are connected to the Internet for music discovery, playlists, and library management. My sixteen year-old daughter has a Zune, goes to a high school with 3700 kids, and has never once encountered another person with a Zune, shared music, or even used the Wifi functionality on the device. Welcome to the social? It’s 2007. How about welcome to the Internet. Duh.

[unfortunately controversial paragraph removed, explanation here]

So what are you waiting for? Buy one (or more!) now from Circuit City and subscribe to Yahoo! Music Unlimited if you haven’t already.

Word up,
ian c rogers
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