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.

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?

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.