Music & Music Artists

When Lucas Gonze first started at Yahoo! more than two years ago, the first thing he told me was that we needed a microformat for playlisting. Since we’d just finished creating and implementing XSPF I was allergic to the idea of another format, this one in HTML instead of XML. But Lucas was right and (thankfully) persistent. He finally convinced me by pointing out the fact I was in denial of: “No 14 year-old MySpace kid is going to create an XML file, upload it to a 3rd party host, make sure the mime type is set correctly, etc. It has to be as easy as writing HTML to add media to Web pages, and shouldn’t involve proprietary technologies like Flash.”

We started playing with the idea and prototyping how this might work. Lucas created hTrack, the microformat. We learned a lot and decided what we wanted to build and how we wanted to roll it out.

A few weeks back we released step zero, our first road-tested version of our Web-based Media Player. The idea is insanely simple:

1) Add this single line of javascript to your page:
<script src=”http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js”></script>
2) Add a link to any MP3 to your page, like so:
<a href=”http://209.133.33.135/~icr/BeastieBoys/Denver_Intro_TimeForLiving.mp3″>Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver</a>

and BOOM, you have a media player. Of course there’s a lot more you can do with it if you’d like. For more advanced uses see the public wiki or join the mailing list and converse with some of the creative and talented hackers there (we also hang out in #heavy on irc.landoleet.org if you want to drop by).

Again, playing MP3s is just the beginning. Note that the version on Music.Yahoo.com supports our subscription service. The next version will support Ogg, WMA, and any codec you have installed. Of course we’ve got a plan for video (it’s not called the Yahoo! Audio Player).

The idea is to make media a first-class object on Web pages and and abstracted away from proprietary technologies. The video tag in HTML 5 is headed the right direction, but the hAudio microformat (which we tentatively plan to support) will get us there even faster.

We’ve been very happy with the response. c|net and others included the player in their blog posts about the player, but more importantly MP3 bloggers are adopting it and smart folks are finding other clever uses for it.

Hope you dig it. If not, let us know why so we can improve it. If you do use it, be sure to add a link to your site on the Wiki so we can check it out.

To see it in action, here are a few Beastie Boys songs I recorded from the sound board back in 1998:

Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver. Check the crowd noise when The Biz starts singing. Crazy.
Slow and Low, live in Kansas City
Ricky’s Theme, also from Denver
Flute Loop, recorded live in Chicago

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music