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Yahoo! Buys Musicmatch
coyotegestalt writes "According to PC World, Yahoo! has just finalized a deal to buy Musicmatch (both its On Demand and download services) for $160 million. More details at IBD. This is a major narrowing of the online music market."
As far as I can tell, Yahoo has an on-line radio service, but not a music services system like MusicMatch. It's not so much narrowing the field as Yahoo was never really in the field to begin with. It's more like moving a player around.
How exactly does this represent a major narrowing of the online music industry?
Yahoo didn't have any sort of pay music service that I can think of. Their "Launch" thing is basically just a radio station kind of deal. And MusicMatch doesn't say "online music" to me. They're a late comer in the game. Yahoo probably figures they can enter the game buy snapping up the newest (cheapest) player.
This is a major narrowing of the online music market.
Not really. For all practical intents and purposes, Apple has the online music market under its thumb. Barring some very unYahoo-like innovation, the consequences of this sale will likely be nothing more than surface ripples.
~Tirinal
How is Yahoo's search engine sceond rate?
A little bit late to the game but the Yahoo! Search interface at http://search.yahoo.com/ is almost as clean as Google's.
Yahoo's search results, supplied by algorithms combined from the once-superior Yahoo, Altavista, and Inktomi, is in my opinion (and many search engine watchers too) just as good as Google's too.
As for their music acqusition, personaly I use iTunes. I look forward to see what Google does next. Picasa/Hello are pretty good acquisitions.