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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."
Great! A second-rate search engine buys a second rate MP3 player! News at 11!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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
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.
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.
Why is this in any way important?
This means little to most slashdotters. We dont use Yahoo, we all switched to google ages ago. We dont use Musicmatch Jukebox, thats what cdex, winamp, xmms, mplayer, etc is for. Didnt we just go through this a few hours ago with Real's player. We bitch, moan, but we dont even use the services / software anyway. This headline is just about exciting as popular desktop wallpaper site merges with popular desktop icon site.
I'm wearing slashdot green today.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Well, I PAID for the "lifetime" update subscription for MusicMatch a couple years ago, and have been very happy withe the app. Unfortunatly, Yahoo! is notorious for filling its pages (mail, groups, etc.) with huge, obnoxious ads--even on paid eamil accounts. So if Yahoo! junks up MusicMatch with its typical ads like their other online services, I'll dump it in a heartbeat.
MusicMatch has been a lean, mean app that has worked on systems that WinAmp couldn't. If Yahoo mucks this one up, I'll be really pissed.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Does Yahoo own other online music shops already? Otherwise, how is this narrowing the market?
This might re-invigorate Musicmatch if Yahoo decides to roll out the Marketing Machine.
This is a major narrowing of the online music market.
Excuse me? I don't see any "Yahoo! Music Download" service folding up. "Launch Music on Yahoo" is a music news site, now likely to see its brand image tied closer to the MusicMatch music delivery service.
Yahoo!'s favorite music delivery service at this point according to the launch.yahoo.com page appears to be going out and buying the CD the old fashioned way at Target.
Has anyone noticed how impossible this stuff is to remove from a new Dell computer? Hopefully Yahoo! does something about this bloated piece of ubiquitous spyware.
Funny how now you can use a company's search engine to crack a piece of its software!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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
You ready for an awesome knock-knock joke?
Knock knock?
Who's there?
Goo
Goo who?
GOOOOOOOOOOOGLE
But seriously....
that we have to listen to the Yahoo! yodel after every 4 mp3's?
Is it 5:30 yet?
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 have a paid Yahoo email account. I haven't seen a big obnoxious ad in my email interface since they re-vamped and upped their quotas earlier this year.
How is this a "major narrowing of the online music market" when all the same players still exist, new stores open left and right, and one simply has a new owner?
./xmms
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Only if the whippees are llamas.
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 should check the latest yahoo messenger client, as it already integrates with launchast radio.
It also lets you put what song you're listening to in your online status, so your friends can appreciate how hip you are, or something.
As a bonus, if a friend clicks on your status, he gets to hear a bit of the song you're hearing.
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
Yahoo isn't just a portal/search engine company. their intent is to become an internet media distribution company (Launch and its recent integration with Messenger comes to mind). Semel's background and talent was in Media Distribution, so buying up musicmatch and adding music distribution to their stable of products is an obvious move.
Musicmatch may not be a big player on the lines of iTunes, but they certainly have an established brand name that Yahoo could take advantage of. and their jukebox player is quite popular, so if they can figure out how to lure more users into the integrated store, that's only a click away in the jukebox player, it could be a success.
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!