These URL's are made for linking

Now that you've been using Rhapsody.com for a couple of days, you might have noticed what's going by in your browser's address bar. You know the address bar -- that space where you type in URL's and then they get scrambled into barcodes and line-noise. We still have our fair share of line-noise, but you might have noticed occassional moments of serenity up there while browsing Rhapsody.com. Pages like:

• www.rhapsody.com/johnnycash
• www.rhapsody.com/shakira
• www.rhapsody.com/50cent

We call these friendly URL's because they're designed for humans, not databases.  Here are the rules:

1. Start with the name of the band, composer or artist you want to link to.
2. Strip out any spaces or punctuation.  ("Blink-182" becomes "Blink182", "R. Kelly" becomes "RKelly")
3. Convert it to lowercase.
4. Attach "http://www.rhapsody.com/" the front.
5. Put it on your website or blog and invite your visitors to enjoy free music.

(One more thing.  We don't use accents or other things hard to type on a US keyboard.  So Björk is at www.rhapsody.com/bjork.)

This web service doesn't have a WSDL (stay tuned...), and there's no XML involved, so you might be wondering why we even consider this a web service.  In a very real sense it is, because it allows easy integration of your website with ours.  If you wanted your site to link to U2's page on rhapsody.com, we could have given you an API to call to look up our RCID value for U2 so you could link to it by database id.  But instead, all you have to do is remember how to spell the band and you get www.rhapsody.com/u2 -- what could be easier?  Don't worry if your spelling isn't perfect. If you link to www.rhapsody.com/mikaeljackson by mistake, we'll give you a search page with guesses for what you might have meant.

We're quite happy with our friendly URL's.  We think they provide a really easy way to integrate music sites -- much easier than alternatives like doing a complete mapping of two database catalogs.  Maybe it's the right way for your site to integrate with Rhapsody.com?

-Leo Parker Dirac

Comments

[Jon Thingvall]

I've been a professional musician (classical piano, organ, keys, trumpet, horn, percussion...just picked up violin and woodwinds) for decades, and I have performed all styles of music. One thing I do a lot is play along with the radio, or whatever CDs I have, to develop my ear. You know what they say: "If you play with better musicians, you become better." If I were teaching music, I think I'd try to subscribe to Rhapsody, so my student(s) and I could play along. If I was working with a school orchestra, for instance, I could buy the parts for Beethoven's 5th, or maybe a Star Wars soundtrack, then we'd hit "play" on Rhapsody and go to town. Or whatever, but I think you see where I'm going with this. Reading is fundamental, true, but a good ear is a precious thing, too! (And Rhapsody could advertise links to Hal Leonard Publishing, or G. Schirmer...!)

[Steve]

Hey guys,
Big suggestion coming up:

Everyone has an instant messenging service of some sort. It would be really cool if there were some way to put our currently playing song title and artist in our instant messenging profiles/away messages so people could see what we are listening to on Rhapsody. Maybe even let them click the link so they too can hear the song. Just a suggestion.

Steve

[Ryan]

Would it be possible to allow us to link to a certain album by typing say "http://rhapsody.com/U2/HowToDismantleAnAtomic Bomb" to get to http://www.rhapsody.com/album?albumId=6629835

I would love this feature as it would allow me to do some really cool things with my xanga blog, where i could link to rhapsody rather than amazon.

[Mia]

But what if I'm looking for one song to put on my site so it's not so quiet. How do i get that? Thats what i would like to know.

Thank You anyway Mia

[Leo Parker Dirac]

Hello Mia.

We expose URLs that will play individual songs. Go to any album page, right click on the play button for the track you want, and select 'Copy Link Location' (firefox) or 'Copy Shortcut' (IE). Now you can paste that URL into your own blog. Anybody clicking the link will hear that one song play back.

Hope this helps.

-Leo Parker Dirac

[Steve]

Interesting name. . .

But yes, I do agree, I mentioned this a while ago and I am glad you brought it up. If enough of us want it, Im sure someone will figure out how to do it.