Yahoo Wants To Own Your Listeners
Jan 8th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Digital Music, Podcasting Services 
Yahoo today announced a new free browser-based MP3 player that you can use and freely embed in your page.
Here’s how it works:
- You add links to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
- You add a line of code to insert Yahoo’s Javascript library.
- Working play buttons appear next to MP3s in your page. Click on them and it brings up an MP3 player.
It sounds kind of cool, at first glance. In fact, the guys at TechCrunch are calling this “a good thing”.
They’re wrong. Here’s why:
- First of all, Yahoo’s player duplicates the functionality of a lot of existing Flash-based MP3 players. If you’ve got MP3s to share, there are free plugins for the popular blogging platforms that embed players into your pages.
- You don’t want to outsource control of your site’s look or functionality to a third party. If you put a middle man between your content and your audience, they can change the features, introduce advertising and even hijack your content at any time. It’s happened before.
- You especially don’t want to rely on Yahoo for this. Remember how Yahoo unceremoniously killed their podcast portal last year? They could drop support for this MP3 player at any time, which would break every page that you used their player on.
Steer clear of Yahoo’s MP3 player like the plague. If you really want to see it in action, though, you can check it out below.
Here’s an example using a track from by Thievery Corporation from Wired’s excellent Creative Commons CD.
If you’re using WordPress, there’s audio player plugin, sid-mp3, PodPress and others that put an MP3 player on your site.
They don’t have a Yahoo! logo on them, though, or a link to Yahoo’s search.
Heh.
[…] Podcasting News gives three valid reasons why webmasters, podcasters and voice talent should avoid the Yahoo MP3 Player: […]
[…] TechCrunch consider it ‚Äúa good thing‚Äù, while Podcasting News says that the Yahoo’s player is, in fact, a duplicate of the common existing Flash players, there is no need to use an intermediate between your content and your audience, and especially do not have to trust Yahoo! that killed their own podcast portal before. […]