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Yahoo Plans Its Own Music Player, Download Service
iPod writes "Since late last year, Yahoo has been developing its own music player software, which will be underpinned by a subscription and download service provided by MusicNet, sources familiar with the plan said. Yahoo is developing its own music player software, backed by MusicNet-provided downloads and subscriptions, that it plans to run alongside the recently purchased Musicmatch."
"Yahoo Plans Its Own Music Player, Download Service"
Maybe this is because I'm only halfway through my morning coffee...but...why?
It seems at this point these companies are merely flooding a drowning market that is online music stores. Seems like a new one pops up weekly among the big companies.
Next thing you know there'll be a new thing around called gusic and google will be right behind the new market. Why can't this companies just stick to what they do best?
Bad karma for correcting people I always say.
I wonder what broadcast.com is worth today. But I am happy that Mark Cuban got the money to but the Dallas Mav's, he is probably the most entertaining owner in the NBA.
We all knew Yahoo was going to kill off the conventional media companies like ABC, NBC, and CBS - just a matter of time.
Just like MSN was going to kill CNN and Fox News.
I sure wouldn't want to be in Steve Jobs' shoes knowing that the same minds behind the Yahoo/Broadcast.com integration are now coming after my customers.
I bet if Mark Cuban was still involved, they would have the best service on the web. That is because the #1 thing that guides Cuban's buisness decisions is he wants the customer to be happy. Everything he touches turns to gold. He should be a case study in buisness schools. Amazing how some people can bring wild sucess and others can't do anything better than sue (SCO) or intimidate (RIAA).
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
Looks like online music downloads are the new gold rush, the new .com: every major player from past revolutions has missed the boat, and wants some slice of the action.
I'd be lucky if even one of them survives.
(well, except MS, but it's because they don't care if they lose a couple billions a year, and because 95% of desktops come with WMP installed anyway)
I rip them from my own CD's and trade with friends (since we paid for the CD, we can make copies and give them out for free to anyone we want, regardless of what the RIAA says)
No, that's what says. As much as you might hate it and not wish to believe it, it's true. Copyright does exist, and just saying "well it's only for a few friends" does not excuse you from complying with it. You have NO LEGAL RIGHT to copy those copyrighted CD's unless they say you can.
There are limited exceptions for educational fair use, but those don't exactly apply here.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
I have every legal right to do anything I want with what I own. If I buy a CD, I can copy it as many times as I want, give out those copies to anyone. It is no different than when people used to make copies of tapes back in the 80's and early 90's. Explain to me how it was different back then from today? Not only would people copy tapes for friends, but they would copy music off the radio. I knew of stations in the 80's that played music without a DJ talking during the start of the song so people could make copies. And you are going to tell me that today I can't copy what I OWN???
Or how is this different than a decade ago when people made copies with their VHS tape? And then they shared it. Heck, I knew people who taped movies off HBO or Cinemax and then saved it.
The RIAA is messing with your mind. I don't care what the RIAA says, or how much they intimidate people, it is a fundamental right that you can copy what you own, share it with friends, use it in the car, whatever you want. What do you think is comming next? A EULA for music that says you can only play it on one music device, and if you want to play that song on a different music device you have to buy an additional license? The music companies will try and squeeze every last nickle out of you if you let them. I for one will never pay twice for something.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
You've got a good point.
Imagine you are sitting there craving some Jazz. You fire up iTunes play some Armstrong, but suddenly you want Ella Fitzgerald. Problem is Ella is only selling her music through Yahoo! because that is the deal Yahoo! made with the record companies. Now you've got to fire up Yahoo!'s player.
After a few songs you realize that it isn't Jazz you were interested in, it was Punk Rock all along. Of course you've got to fire up Real Player because you've purchased it through them. After a few Racid songs you want to listen to some Motörhead... back to iTunes. Wait! After firing up iTunes you realize that it was Yahoo! that sold you the Motörhead tracks.
Or... was it Napster? After waiting for that to load, and then searching you find it. Finally Motörhead is coming through the speakers.
The problem above is caused by a few things. First, you can't buy every type of music in any one store. Some albums, usually soundtracks, don't have all the songs available on your favorite music store. The soundtrack for "A Bronx Tale" is a good example on iTunes. Last I checked, there was only two songs available for purchase because of licensing issues. (Which encouraged me to "steal" the song I wanted instead of buying it) The second problem is that different services offer different prices and have different promotions. What is 99 cents on iTunes may be 88 cents on Rhapsody. It may just make sense to get some songs from iTunes and some from Napster and some from Yahoo! and even some from Wal-Mart. Now, this is usually a good thing, competition and all. But it's making the industry too fragmented.
If we are going to purchase music there needs to be a way to export/import to other DRM schemes. I'm all for online music stores but it seems that being locked into one choice isn't going to work for most people. These companies need to get together and work on one standard - or risk losing everyone to piracy again.
Then again, you can just burn the music to a CD and then rip it to mp3 (or ogg et. al.). But that is what got everyone in this mess in the first place, isn't it?
Get your Unix fortune now!
If I want mp3's, I rip them from my own CD's and trade with friends (since we paid for the CD, we can make copies and give them out for free to anyone we want, regardless of what the RIAA says).
No, really, you can't - not legally. You are allowed to format shift (for example, you may rip mp3s from the CD so you can listen to this music on your mp3 player). You are not allowed to make unlimited copies and redistribute them. This is precisely what is prohibited by copyright law.
Yahoo plans to beef up its IM service with more-interactive music features that enable people to listen to one another's playlists, according to sources familiar with the initiative.
So how is this different than if I share my songs?
Because Yahoo has made a deal with music publishers who own the rights to these songs to allow them to do what they are doing. You, on the other hand, have made no such deal with music publishers. You are simply violating copyright law by making unauthorized copies of music, the reproduction rights of which you do not own, and giving these unauthorized copies away to friends.
These individual "music download" announcements coming out of the UK (OD2, Virgin, etc) - and the US (MS, Yahoo, Real, everyone else) are part of a larger campaign by Microsoft to smother Apple. Will any one of these services really knock Apple out of the top spot? Noooooo. Is MS looking long-term at control of the underlying technology? HELL YES. I'm sure MS is doing their utmost to make sure these crappy services proliferate and thrive and kill each other off. Only at the end will MS consume the strongest service using it's technology. It's all about control of the standards and not any individual music store. Apple needs to find a way to open their DRM Fairplay scheme up slowly (and with maximum effect) to counter this blitz of crap that's coming to market.
why?
Portal. IM. Searching. Now, music. They're just jumping on the bandwagon, albeit 2 years too late. They had a good idea once, and they let that walk away from them. Or, in more official terms, they IPOed.
Hmm, so let's see, who else has just recently IPOed...Ah yes, Google! webmail, browser....Hmm.
Sure I'm a geek -- but I don't tape my glasses anymore, now they're metal.
In any case, I sit working at my computer all day, and I can play whatever I want, whenever I want, from wherever I have high-speed access (including wi-fi).
At home, I keep an old PC wired to my stereo, and remote-desktop it so I can control my stereo via my wi-fi laptop.
Geeky, sure. Apologies for that? No way.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Remember the days of...
CompuServe
AOL
GEnie
Prodigy
The Source
They all wanted to *own* the home computer connection market. Together they balkanized it so that it never reached critical mass. Only ONE thing changed this, SMTP and the 'Internet bridge.' I used to be on CompuServe, and remember when we could begin routing email out over the Internet bridge. The other (surviving) providers followed suit, and suddenly anyone could email anyone, and home computer connectivity had its first Killer App.
The Web followed that, and though Microsoft has tried mightily, they haven't quite managed to 0wn it, and it looks like that chance might well be gone. (If only because cellphones are now on steroids, viewing the web.)
Then, in spite of a set of open protocols describing IRC, we began seeing Instant Message Balkanization. AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc, etc, and of course none of them talk to each other. (Fortunately, GAIM talks to them all.) The idiots didn't learn!
Now we're hearing about a bunch of deliberately incompatible music download protocols emerging. For that matter, we've had a bunch of deliberately incompatible filesharing protocols, already. STUPID! STUPID! STUPID!
At about this point, I'm sick and tired of people telling me how stupid government is, and how the private sector can always do better. The Internet is the best counter-example. A government project put in place a series of non-owned, open protocols and standards, people came, and for the most part, it just works. Business, in its own-the-whole-pie mindset, denies critical mass to Instant Messaging and online music distribution. If the idiots could cooperate, they could all share a HUGE pie, each would have a bigger chunk of that pie than the whole pies they now have, and customers would be MUCH better off.
That said, I won't argue that government isn't stupid, just that they have no monopoly on stupidity. Sometimes, and the Internet is the poster child for this, government can do things right and business can do things wrong.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Everybody and his brother is making an MP3 player and music download service. Before long, we'll have 300 of them. After a while, the market will be so over-saturated that most of them will go out of business. Hopefully in the end, we'll have more than just 1 or 2 services left.
Gee officer, I'm awful sorry I shot the guy, but heck, I own the gun, I got a right to do what I want with it and ... hey ... wait .. what are you doing with those handcuffs.
If I buy a CD, I can copy it as many times as I want, give out those copies to anyone. It is no different than when people used to make copies of tapes back in the 80's and early 90's. Explain to me how it was different back then from today?
Um, because people didn't give tapes out to anyone. They gave them to a few friends. Do that now, and the RIAA probably won't notice. That of course doesn't mean they don't care. The RIAA was in fact very displeased with the idea of taping records and trading them. But they didn't own enough Congressmen to do anything about it.
Or how is this different than a decade ago when people made copies with their VHS tape? And then they shared it. Heck, I knew people who taped movies off HBO or Cinemax and then saved it.
It's not. Jack Valenti, in his famous "VCR is the Boston strangler" testimony compared people time-shifting shows to people taping records and trading them.
But you're missing one key point. You talk about trading your music with friends. That's great. Except that's not what everyone is upset about. They're upset about trading it with *everyone*. If you have a password-protected FTP server with music for your friends (or even for you to listen to remotely), that's fine. If you transfer files to your friends via IM, I don't think the RIAA will notice or care.
But you can't seriously claim everyone on the Internet is your friend. Or even everyone on a certain P2P network. Now, if you want to make the argument that you should be able to give your music away to everyone for free, that's fine, but that's totally different from giving it away to only your friends.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Oh wait. I have to keep paying forever? Or else they take my furniture away? Oh.
Now to get back to your point, you do have a good one. The rental model is good for some people under some circumstances. It works for you? Great. But some people prefer the idea of pay once, own it forever. Those tracks you enjoy now, will you want to listen to them twenty years from now? Some of 'em, yeah. Will your rental service still be around twenty years from now? Doubtful. Bye bye tracks.
So does this mean that to play .YHO or whatever files I'll need to add yet ANOTHER player to my machine to only support that one format?
.MOV and Realplayer for .RM & .RA.
I hope it's not true. I already have Quicktime for
All of these media companies need to release the source for their proprietary sub-standard audio codecs.
Gotta love having to pay forever to get something.. and never own anything..
The ultimate dream of big business.. perpetual income.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the free market can be a useful tool, but I don't worship it. IMHO, the current situation is a 'deep local minima,' meaning that without a big shakeup, it's just not going to get appreciably better. I don't expect these guys to wake up one day and say, "Gee, if we'd just sit down together and hammer out a good common standard, the market growth would be explosive, and everybody would be better off." Early online service providers were in a similar local minima, except that cheap, easy email bridging, and later web bridging pointed the escape path to become Internet service providers.
In our wonderful nation of extremes, seem to want to pigeonhole too many things into the extremes. So you contrast slugging it out in the market with out-of-touch committees coming up with X.500 and the OSI 7-layer taco. The Internet is somewhere in the middle, with drafts evolving based on practical experience, by people who have learned that sometimes working together... works.
Slightly different note... Sometimes 'good enough' is the enemy of better or best. But I think what is really happening with the market competition of Instant Messaging and music downloads has nothing at all to do with quality, and everything to do with lockin.
That's the other side of the gripe about American business. It seems to me that they're afraid to compete, so they want to FORCE people to be customers.
At the end of the day, I AM THE CUSTOMER. I don't like how they're doing business, I think it's short-sighted. Furthermore, if SOMEBODY will do business in what I consider to be an enlightened fashion, at a resonable (not necessarily the lowest) price, I'll take my business there. So far the market is disappointing me.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.