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."

Comments

I must ask..

[nuclear305]

"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.

Re:I must ask..

[here4fun]

they will probably leverage all the people who have yahoo accounts. people trust yahoo, and use it everyday for email, fantasy sports, movie info, etc. the amount of free advertising they would get would be huge. unlike if i started getmusicfromme.com, nobody would know about it and nobody would think it would be a universal format. i bet yahoo is banking on people using them because they are so well known.

Hmm

[elementus]

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?

Re:Wow, just like they manhandled the TV networks!

[here4fun]

Seems like only yesterday that Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.4 billion

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).

Unique Players & DRM

[ImaLamer]

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?

Re:That's one

[turnstyle]

"But who listens to music tethered to their computer? Its so geeky that guys with taped glasses are laughing."

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.

Have these idiots learned NOTHING?

[dpilot]

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.

A different way to look at this

[FunWithHeadlines]

I for one am a total convert to the rental approach to furniture. I don't even know how to write about it without coming across like spam -- having instant access to over 40,000 couches, dining tables, chairs, and beds for much less every month than if I were to buy the furniture outright utterly changed the way I enjoy furniture.

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.

Ah subscriptions

[nurb432]

Gotta love having to pay forever to get something.. and never own anything..

The ultimate dream of big business.. perpetual income.

Re:Private sector is working fine.

[dpilot]

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.