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.