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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."
So how is this different than if I share my songs?
The Musicmatch acquisition brought Yahoo the third-largest audience for online music, according to Internet research firm ComScore Media Metrix. As of August, Yahoo's Launch ranked top with 14 million unique users, followed by AOL Music at 13 million and Musicmatch at 5.8 million. MSN Music came in fourth with 4.3 million, Napster owner Roxio had 2.1 million unique users, and RealNetworks' Listen accounted for 1.8 million.
I don't own any drm music. 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). Those pay services all have their own DRM (I am guessing from what I have been reading), so it is like owning a cripled peice of software. I don't get why people buy something that will only work on X's player.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
Does this favor those that give "value add" - like Apple, who develops products along the entire vertical chain (below music creation point, anyway) and can distinguish themselves in the market any where along the chain *OR* will the monopoly presence of MS and the use of the WMA format by the commodity providers make that uniqueness/differentiation hard to maintain/defend?
And we already know that Apple produces better software
Remember when Yahoo was a search engine? And one day they started using other search engines under contract because Yahoo couldn't keep up any more? Yahoo does a good job rebranding other people's work (news.yahoo.com...) and presenting it in an integrated location. iTunes Music Store will continue to fluorish. They're popular right now and they know it. If iTMS wanes in the slightest, I bet they start licensing all over. They already have a referral program.
In all probability there will be an explosion of music download services, followed by consolidation into one or two dominant players. I don't think price differentiation will play a big role in the long term. What will probably make the most difference -- and allow multiple services to exist -- is labels exclusively licensing their tracks to one service or another. Seen another way, this means the most likely service providers in the long run are the (major) labels themselves, because the cost of running a music download site is low (primarily a marketing cost). Indies will probably prefer to continue to license their tracks to third-party stores, although I'd like to see them set up co-operatives.
We might see aggregators, sites that allow you to transparently purchase from multiple stores. However, this doesn't seem to be very prevalent in other "obvious" areas, e.g. search engines that submit your query to google, jeeves etc and then present a single result? They may exist, but they're not popular.
Well first, being "tethered to your computer" isn't so bad since anyone capable of setting up a stereo system is also capable of hooking their computer up to it and thus listening anywhere in their home. I noticed a music player on my sister's computer the other day and she can barely use the thing (I have to setup her email whenever she moves). It's probably a lot like an advanced stereo itself to her. Despite the recent popularity of hard drive based MP3 players the vast majority of people still don't have them and keep all their music at home, only taking some of it with them on the go (which you can also do for select songs via Real's service if you buy the song for burning).
;p ^^
Second, one of the things Real advertises is that you can use your account from any networked computer be it home, at work (lol, well I suppose some bosses might let you), or say a wireless laptop on a college campus. I also saw something about Rhapsody over mobile phones w/ headphones. If that performs well then the Rhapsody person not only has access to more music than someone with an MP3 player, he only needs his phone to do it and not a separate player.
I imagine there are still things to work out like battery life of a cell phone playing music for hours, but it's certainly not as limited as you say. The Real guy we had for an interview mentioned some good numbers for Rhapsody subscribers so it is getting people. Personally, though, I just use a flash player with some of my own CDs ripped and think you 'battery sucking, hard drive hauling, need access to a billion songs either by buying/stealing/subscribing people' are insane.
I know what they did with launch.com. They killed realplayer support first while I was using windows and Opera and gave only choice: "windows media player" which especially I HATE the sound quality.
Now they do lame tricks on their video services to make everyone use Internet Explorer while every browser now (including safari) supports liveconnect extensions.
So, Yahoo as I admire you are FBSD based, you have been asshole to alternative OS/Player users.
No wonder the "thing" they will offer will be DRM'ed WMA, not interested.