Yahoo! Releases Music API

Yahoo! today announced the release of their latest API: the Yahoo! Music API. The music API gives developers access to Yahoo!’s “catalog of artists, albums, tracks, videos, ratings and more,” according to the company. It allows developers to interface with Yahoo! Music’s database via “charts, search, similarities, genres, artists, and user recommendations and ratings.”

The REST-based API returns data in XML, JSON, and RSS and uses BBAuth to allow user authentication for Yahoo! Music users to access their personal data via external apps. Use of the API is currently limited to 5k queries per day.

About a year ago, Yahoo! released a Facebook application allowing users to share music videos served from Yahoo! Music with friends via Facebook. Today they’re using that application as an example of something you could build with the new Music API. Indeed, the API includes an embeddable Flash-based video player that can be used in third party apps.

Despite Yahoo!’s troubles, they still have one of the most visited music sites on the web with 21 million visitors per month. That’s a whole lot of music data that can now be unlocked by third party services.