AOL Music Now publishes its web feeds as an XML document containing content items and web links. These web feeds are used to deliver structured information. Such data includes Top 100 songs, Daily Playlists summaries with links to the full versions of the content, and other related metadata. The main web feed format used is known as Really Simple Syndication or RSS.

All AOL Music Now RSS feeds start at the parent level URL of http://aol.musicnow.com/rss/

If you try to view a feed in a browser usually by simply clicking the RSS icon , most likely you will see raw XML and not a well-formatted page in HTML. To view an RSS feed properly, you will need to subscribe to that feed in a feed reader. One way to see this information properly is to subscribe to an AOL Music Now feed using aol.com's new RSS reader, My AOL .

If you see the button next to a feed such as those found on AOL.com's Feed Directory, simply click on the button to add the feed your My AOL web-based feed reader. You can also directly enter the RSS feeds directly into your favorite news reader or aggregator application. In addition, many email readers and browsers, including AOL Explorer, provide an easy way to subscribe to and read RSS feeds.

Developers can use the content within the RSS feed for their own web or client applications. Since RSS is a flavor of XML, any XML parser or parsing libraries will work with RSS. AOL Musc Now RSS feeds conform to the RSS 2.0 specification. Also depending on the feed and its contents, the RSS feed may also include namespace extensions.

The parent level feed returns "Top Charts" information for the AOL Music Now system. This comprises a daily list of RSS feeds for the top level RSS summaries. For example:

http://aol.musicnow.com/rss/

Top level RSS summary feeds have a single static URL. This feed returns a list of genres and genre ids. For example:

http://aol.musicnow.com/rss/genre/

Drilling down to a detail level, many RSS feeds support arguments or parameters, which enable you to generate different custom RSS feeds depending on the specific content you are interested in. From the example above, the Blues genre has an id=102. Therefore if we are only interested in the web feeds associated with Blues, the URL would look like this:

http://aol.musicnow.com/rss/genre/?id=102

Some RSS Web feeds can even be more customized using different parameters or settings. These feeds are known as custom or dynamic RSS feeds because the content of these RSS feeds is dynamic and changes on a regular basis (typically every 24 hours).

http://aol.musicnow.com/rss/genre/topsongs/?id=102&limit=20

In the example above, the web feed will retrieve the top 20 songs for the Blues genre. Since these parameters give more flexibility when interfacing with AOL Music Now, we provide enhanced API documentation for many of these feeds.

Download the complete technical documentation.

Music_Now_RSS_1_5_1.pdf (59K)

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