Music industry watch

Yahoo acquires WebJay

Looks like Yahoo has acquired WebJay, along with its creator Lucas Gonze:

I met Lucas more than a year ago when searching for a suitable default playlist format for the Y! Music Engine and stumbling across his excellent survey of playlist formats. We quickly became involved in the quest for the last playlist format the world would ever need (with help from many other smarties, such as Robert Kaye), the result of which is the extensible and open XSPF format that is starting to make the kids dance these days. Anyone involved in the XSPF project will tell you that I was completely useless and Lucas (and others!) was (were) indispensable.

Congrats to Lucas for getting solidly hitched to the corporate teat!

I continue to be excited that Yahoo believes in XSPF -- having a large company throw their weight behind this emerging open playlist standard pleases me immensely. The skill of making mix-tapes has largely been lost in the shuffle to make everything digital, and making playlists and sharing them with others has a lot of potential. Especially if it can be done without pirating all the music that goes with it -- passing around small XML playlists that people can use with their own players and content is key!

Technorati Tags: yahoo, xspf

Posted by Mayhem at January 9, 2006 05:26 PM