A new rich snippets format for music

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Since we introduced Rich Snippets
back in 2009, we’ve created rich snippet formats for a
variety of different content types,
such as Events, People and Reviews, to show users relevant information about the content they can
find on a site. Today, we
announced
the launch of rich snippets for music. With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages
using the newly created
music markup spec on
schema.org, and search results for that
site may start displaying song information in the snippet so that users know that there are songs
or samples therefor them to listen to:

Several initial partners have implemented the music markup on their sites, including MySpace,
Rhapsody and ReverbNation. As with other rich snippet formats, implementing the markup does not
guarantee that your site will be displayed with the UI shown above on a given search; a variety of
factors affect whether a particular rich snippet type will appear in our search results. However,
having correct markup is a prerequisite for music rich snippets to ever be displayed. You can use
the
rich snippets testing tool
to test the markup of your page and see an illustration of what the search result would look
like with music rich snippets.

For now, music rich snippets will display song information when users search for artists, album
names or song names. We’ll continue working both on expanding our existing rich snippets formats
and on creating new ones, so keep watching for updates about new types of content that you can
surface for users right in your site’s snippets.

If you have any questions about this new rich snippets format, you can head over to our
Webmaster Forum
and ask. You can also check out our
page on rich snippets
in our Webmaster Tools Help Center, which includes an article specifically about
music rich snippets.

Posted by
Gideon Wald,
Associate Product Manager