A couple of weeks ago we released a new IMVironment which lets you listen to music from popular mp3 blogs while you’re chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. As you encounter tracks that you like, you can save them as a playlist in the IMV and send your “remix” to your friend over IM so they can check it out.
Music blogs have become increasingly popular over the last year both for consumers and advertisers as “Fortune 500 companies are waking up to the fact that young hipsters are congregating on MP3 blogs”.
The theory goes that, “the people who troll for music on MP3 blogs tend to be tastemakers who wield considerable influence over their peers.” Why are these kids digging on music blogs so much? Well – you’ll have to try for yourself. Check out the IMV to start exploring music blogs for yourself. When you do – you’ll encounter a pretty amazing place where “BlogJs” like Aurgasm’s Paul Irish are working to “scout out music you've never heard and deliver only the finest."
The IMV is the latest chapter of a web music story we’ve been telling all year long. It's an initial foray into making the web music discovery process a truly social experience, something that you do together with a friend. If you use YIM, you can give it a spin by clicking on the IMVironment drop down next time you’re chatting with someone and selecting the “Honda Fit” IMV. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Popularity: 30% [?]
The last 30 days have been a revelation. After spending the past year working on web music applications in Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, I'm starting to believe that this digital music thing is finally coming together. I can almost taste how it's going to work.
Today we're releasing a piece of very early, very experimental (possibly dodgy) alpha software -- a desktop application called Blog Remix written using Adobe AIR. Blog Remix immerses you in an active music blog experience. It merges blog posts and MP3s and lets you mix together different tracks or blog entries from your favorite MP3 blogs. Save the mix for yourself, or share it with the rest of us as an XSPF playlist, podcast, or feed (using Atom, my personal favorite syndication format, or RSS).
Until recently I was never much of a music blog reader. Don't get me wrong, I've been a big MP3 blog fan for a while. The whole independent, organic nature of the music blog space appealed to me. But really, I was in it for the music. In my mind, music blogs were like radio stations. Last year, Joseph Magnani and I built the Easylistener player, so we could easily turn any webpage into a radio station or mixtape.
The original mixtapes, those magnetic cassettes we used to know and love, had context - usually something along the lines of "Songs for Amy", "Cottage Mix" or "My Badass Supermix." In the worst-case scenario the mix would involve some Don McLean or James Taylor tunes, while you curled up in the fetal position lamenting love lost or betrayed. But a mixtape can be enjoyed on many levels even when removed from its original context.
This is what the Music Blogs application aims to do. It's like a virtual crashpad where you can pick out all kinds of great mixtapes. Every music blog has its own personality, and you get a sense of what each blog is about simply by listening to the music that's posted.
This was my line of reasoning when I developed these apps last year. But music blogs are not just mixtapes. They are so much more. As one prominent music blogger wrote to me,
"Said the Gramophone - and numerous other blogs - put so much emphasis, commitment and spirit into the writing on the site. They are not just vehicles for the transmission of MP3s… Our focus is equal parts curation (selection of songs) and writing (thinking about the songs)."
Within Yahoo!, we've been having the same conversation, with Ian Rogers, our Media 2.0 visionary leading the charge. The problem, from a developer's perspective, is that in order to empower publishers to marry content with context, music bloggers (and all publishers) must share their work in a way that a computer can understand.
As much as we'd like it to, our Facebook Music Blogs app doesn't seamlessly merge MP3 tracks with the associated blog posts because we can't get it to work consistently, in a way we can automate and scale. This is because of the variations in how music blogs syndicate (or share) their content. Some music blogs don't even provide an RSS or Atom feed!
This has become a bit of an obsession for me, and I've even set out to classify the different ways that blogs currently share content. In the process of developing the Blog Remix app, I've realized that many blogs already do this correctly.
The application comes preloaded with a set of "Popular Music Blogs." You may notice that many popular music blogs aren't on this list. By necessity, the app is populated by blogs that share their content well. This is a prerequisite for creating rich experiences that meld audio content with original context.
Check out Saidthegramophone using Blog Remix and you can almost taste the red wine they're drinking as they write. Music blogs are like the new album art and liner notes, open for anyone to interpret, reinvent, and share with the rest of us.
But it works only if music bloggers share content in a way that applications like Blog Remix can understand. We need an RSS or ATOM feed that includes media content and the entire post written within the feed. If you're feeling particularly progressive, go the extra mile and incorporate the hAudio microformat into your HTML markup.
These small steps make it possible for developers like me to create powerful new distribution channels for your blog and the artists you write about. Together, we can build the open media web. You can start right now by trying out Blog Remix for yourself and letting me know what you think.
Popularity: 24% [?]
William White, January 15th, 2008 on 11:38 pm
Blog Remix is an experimental desktop application from Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group that lets you remix your favorite MP3 blogs. Spend a couple hours immersed in the world of music blogs, saving your favorite posts and building up your own personal mix along the way. When you're done, you can save the result for future reference or export it as a playlist, podcast, or feed (RSS or Atom) to share with your friends.
Who built it
How do I get it
This is an early alpha release of this application, built using the Adobe Air Beta 3. You will run into bugs, and the app may perform sluggishly. Think of it as a proof of concept, which we'll be improving over time.
Popularity: 30% [?]
We just released the Easylistener web music player. You can use it to easily share web music you love on your blog or favorite social network page. We’ve even built this cool embed code generator so you can configure it however you want -- easily.
You’re probably thinking – big deal, there’s already a ton of cool radio player widgets (last.fm, finetune, MOG, Sonific, RBG, etc.) on the web these days. Everyone I know and their brother’s girlfriend’s cousin has released some form of music-player widget to promote a particular media service or offering.
Easylistener is different. It's not about promoting a particular product or service. It’s about embracing a new ideology – one of free-flowing music and ideas, shared via the web by real people who love music.
What can Easylistener do? For starters, it supports virtually any web page as a potential music source. You can point it at a music blog like Scissorkick, or a playlist document like XSPF, M3U or ASX. You can even give it a RSS or ATOM feed and it will play any mp3 links it finds in the feed. This lets you to do some pretty cool stuff like use Pipes to create a RSS feed of recently listened to tracks from last.fm that are also on Hype Machine and then play them back using Easylistener. Wow!
Easylistener makes it easy to play any page on the web with mp3 links in it. But this has nothing to do with “stealing" music or even listening to it for free. Music from artists that inspire and captivate you is always worth paying for. You should go to their shows, pick up a t-shirt, and buy their music. But these days we are virtually drowning in musical choice. Music is ubiquitous -- it surrounds us everywhere, so much so that paradoxically it becomes hard to find. Easylistener is about promoting artists and making it easy for you to share their music so the rest of us can discover new music.
It's also about empowering people to share their own work. I'm not a great musician, but I do love making music. My friends and I get together and jam, and then there’s all that music I played in college. How easy is it to share my own music now? Well, I had to upload the mp3s, and then I had to point Easylistener to them. Damn, that was pretty easy.
Of course, all this web music goodness didn’t come out of nowhere. I remember playing with the desktop media platform Songbird earlier this year and thinking, "Wow, this thing is awesome. What if something like this could run in a web browser and be shared like a widget--almost like a Songbird for the web." I wanted that and I was lucky enough to get a chance to build it.
Songbird is an amazing product and was definitely a huge inspiration for Joe Magnani and I as we developed Easylistener in the Yahoo! Media Innovation Group. Then, of course, we should also acknowledge the influence of the OG player XSPF Web Music Player by Fabricio Zuardi. Fabricio's app is a classic, so it's not surprising we modeled some core features off it. Respect.
Finally, I should mention Yahoo!’s chief playlisting scientist Lucas Gonze, whose visionary ideas got me thinking about this stuff in the first place. I had the pleasure of working with Lucas to help port his amazing Playthispage service from Webjay to Yahoo!. I can’t tell you how psyched I am about the new stuff his team has been working on and what’s coming up next from Yahoo! Music.
But don’t take my word for it -- try Easylistener for yourself. Join the growing number of sites like My Old Kentucky Blog, Swedelife, songs:illinois, and Indie Music Filter already using it. Put Easylistener on your MySpace, blog, or personal website today and tell us what you think.
Popularity: 45% [?]
William White, November 30th, 2007 on 5:30 pm
Easylistener is a Flash music player which can literally play any page on the web. Simply point it at your favorite music blog, RSS feed or playlist document and it will crawl that URL and start playing back any mp3s it finds.
Who built it
How do I get it
Use this handy Code Creator to configure Easylistener just how you want it. Click "Copy to Clipboard" when you're finished customizing it and paste the codes into your blog, myspace or webpage.
Do you want Easylistener on your Facebook? Check out the Music Blogs application. It's hot.
Popularity: 100% [?]
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