Rhapsody Web Services

Make something cool, win great prizes

Today we announced the Rhapsody Web Services contest, where we'll give away lots of prizes, including a trip to see any artist anywhere in the world, a Sonos system with Rhapsody subscription, and lots of Sansa e260 mp3 players with Rhapsody subscriptions. 

The big winners will be announced at Web 2.0, and we'll be giving monthly prizes as well.  So dust off those good ideas and build something unique.  We'll promote it on the new Rhapsody Web Services site, and you could get some nice swag.

It looks like Richard MacManus is the first to review the contest.  Check out his postings at Read/Write Web and ZDNet.

Update: John Musser just posted his thoughts on Programmable Web.

Rolling Stone Feeds

Some of you may have already noticed Rhapsody playback on RollingStone.com.  But now there's a whole new way to mash up the sites yourself.

If you check out one of Rolling Stone's artist feeds (which you'll find just below the artist's picture on the artist pages), you'll notice that the IDs used for each artist on Rolling Stone are the same as those in Rhapsody Web Services. The feeds contain news about the artist.

So try mashing up their news with our playback and data in your own way.  Then tell us about it.

--Dave Hanley

SIGamp Integration with Rhapsody

Some of you may know SIGamp, which is a service that allows you to display what you're listening to on any page.

Here's the process:

The SIGamp plugin observes your playback on Rhapsody.com and uploads it to their service
You grab an image to embed on your blog, email signature, or space, and you're done.

 

Windows only, so my SIGamp will usually be blank.  But yours may not...

I'd love to see an upgrade, which pulls the album art from data.xml and displays it in the SIGamp.  Heck, we'll even be ecumenical and suggest you put those images on songs played by Yahoo! and iTunes.  We're just that way.

--Dave Hanley