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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."
I guess Apple's initial thoughts that online music distribution wouldn't yeild much of a profit hasn't quite shown to be true.
Is it just me, or are all of the internet portals (MSN, AOL, Yahoo) building their own little digital life empires? How long till Google follows suit, or will the even?
so MM knows what you like and will better suit your musical tastes? That would be an interesting data-merge project.
-Randy
yet another pointless add-on to clutter up yahoo more...they're reminding me of that new game katamari damacy...
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
This might re-invigorate Musicmatch if Yahoo decides to roll out the Marketing Machine.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know I'm going against the crowd, but has anyone found anything quite as good as MusicMatch's Smart Tagging capability? Winamp finally has a library, but it still doesn't manage music as well as MusicMatch and has no where near the tag-managment capabilities.
I've seen a couple of products that offer Tags from filenames, but nothing that does tags from file names and directory struture as well as the reverse.
(WinAmp 5 did actually win me over from MMJB, btw. So the question asked in this post is not rhetorical.)
And I thought for sure that Dell would have been the one to buy up MusicMatch. Oh well, as long as Yahoo can keep up the high quality that I've become accustomed to with MM, I'll be happy--not likely given their history though :(
but the last time I did, it just skipped over all 37,000 of my music files because it didn't support .ogg. Any change since then or is it still crippleware ?
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
When Yahoo bought Broadcast.com at the height of the dotcom equity inflation in 1998, the purchase price was divided by the number of songs in which Yahoo thereby owned the copyright. That was the basis for the RIAA agreement, now law, pricing online performances of each song at $0.000,7 each listen. Of course the performance fees are collected in cash, while the Yahoo/Broadcast.com deal was in inflated stock, so the cost of publishing is prohibitive for all but corporate "official" publishers.
The new deal for MusicMatch should provide a new calculus for the "market price per song". How many performances has Yahoo purchased, for how much money? After the math dust has settled, what's the price per listen?
--
make install -not war
I don't use Yahoo for the search engine. I do use it for the email (occasionally) the mapping & directions (not perfect but usually provides a workable starting point), yellow pages, the occasional news story linked from a forum thread and other things.
And it plays their little theeme when it launces. I use a thinkpad and have it mutted, but it will still play the chimes. this means I cannot have a shortcut to it anywhere I might accidently click during a meeting.
Personally, Yahoo lost me forever with their search engine with the X10 popups. Switched to google around that time, as I suspect many others did the same.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Neat, it's almost like I've been bought by Yahoo.
Back in the day, my company (Creative Multimedia Corporation, long since gone the way of the dodo), created MusicMatch.com, MovieMatch.com, HealthExplorer.com, the original Dr. Ruth's website. Among others. I was webmaster for most of these. Oh, the glory days.
When CMC started to fold, we sold off MusicMatch.com and the logo to a little company then called Brava software. I remember transferring and renaming their entire library (20 songs or so) with a shell script. It didn't seem like a good business model, because who would buy these huge music files from them?
But I guess they made it work well enough to get bought.
Yeah, because a player with a minibrowser, video playback, and a 30 MB footprint is so much better. Nullsoft should really continue to develop Winamp 2 again.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
During the two years I was a subscriber, my only complaint was that there was no Linux option. I filled out surveys and finally even complained to customer support. The response I recieved from customer support was that codec licensing agreements prevented them from releasing a Linux port.
Even so I continued to subscribe until I switched to my current job where they do not allow me to listen to online music at work (the main place I use windows as an OS.)
If Yahoo is able to bring out a Linux port of the online service, I will immediately become a subscriber again.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
But anyway, Yahoo, who has no track record in this regard is buying MusicMatch who has no substantial track record to really speak of. Here's my predictions:
Netscape will by this then they will be bought out by Real who will be bought out by SCO who will be bought out by Wal-Mart who will then dump the whole music thing because the RIAA won't sell tracks for 38 cents.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
You aren't alone actually. I switched over completely to WinAmp just because I was tired of MMJB's bloat and speed issues and I miss its great tagging abilities. I haven't found any replacement software that does it as nicely as MMJB did.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Because ITunes definitely does NOT whip its ass for those of use interested in a streaming music service. MusicMatch OnDemand service is one of the few (only?) viable alternatives to Real's Rhapsody.
While I like Google better as a company, and I like their search, email, and news site sbetter, I sure do wish they had some of the portal features Yahoo has. I mean, with Yahoo! Calender, Yahoo! Addressbook, Yahoo! greetings, Yahoo! Messanger, and Yahoo! Mail, and the seamless integration between them all, Yahoo is basically an online groupware suite.
I also wish Google news was customizeable like my.yahoo.com - while Google news is more timely and more relevant, many of the topics have no interest to me, and I'd like to be able to insert stock tickers and whatnot. My Yahoo! even lets you plug your own RSS feeds in now.
I already love Launch cast because of the "my station" feature. Maybe this merger will mean that when I hear a song I can download it for a small fee. That'd be great!
My name is a variety of floral rose, and no, it's not blue
How about...a first-rate portal since its founding? It seems that quite a few people scoff at anything that's not Google/Apple/Linux/etc. without much basis. While Yahoo! Search may have lost its number one position a few years ago, it has certainly reworked its search engine to the point where it's comparable to Google's. It's just that many Slashdotters have tried no search engine recently other than Google, so they wouldn't know.
Roland: It's a waste. A goddamn waste.
I really think Yahoo should concentrate on what they have now instead of trying to expend effort into YET more areas.
Lets see what 'good' yahoo has.
-yahoo auctions? who cares?
-yahoo mail? with gmail now?
-yahoo groups? well, that's good to some extent..
-yahoo's search engine? bleigh, that sucks without google's backend.
-yahoo's portal? you really like that shebang?
Maybe 160mil is spare change to yahoo now, but if they don't establish a core competency, they will probably become irrelevant very soon!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!