Yahoo announced their Yahoo Music API today, releasing another tool in their open strategy of providing services to web developers. Their music API allows other websites to tap into some of the Yahoo Music content. Their API can be used for catalog data, such as searching Yahoo Music by artist, or getting charts like the new releases or popular music or for user data, like recommendations for the user. The user data requires Yahoo’s browser-based authentication while the catalog data does not.

Right now, the rate limit is 5,000 queries a day, which is too low for me to consider it worth building on yet but hopefully they’ll announce a paid service for commercial sites that want to build something serious on it.

Check out the API and apply for an API key here or have a look at their example application (Facebook app, requiring Facebook login).