The grand opening of Yahoo! Music

Posted April 7th, 2009 at 11:06 am by Michael Spiegelman, Yahoo! Music

 5 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

You might notice some really familiar names on Yahoo! Music starting today. No, not classic musicians. Names like YouTube, Pandora, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Amazon, Ticketmaster, and iTunes. That’s because we’re turning Yahoo! inside out and opening it up to what we think are the best music services online.

We’ve been evolving our approach to music for the last year or so. We found that our subscription music offering required a huge amount of resources for a relatively small user base, leading to our partnership with Rhapsody. And new royalty rates made us to rethink our streaming radio service, which is now run by CBS. Through all of these tough decisions as the industry evolved, the biggest constant has been our core music offering, which connects music fans to their favorite musicians. We said, “Why compete with everyone, fighting on all fronts, if we can just move up a layer and be a resource to our users?”

So now we can be all things to all music people with a little help from our industry friends. The new Yahoo! Music Artist Pages now bring together downloads from iTunes, albums from Amazon; streams from Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody; music videos from YouTube; and tickets from Ticketmaster – for more than 500,000 artists. We also include photos from Flickr as well as our own Yahoo! music videos. You can customize your Artist Pages to include your favorite content modules. Previously a closed service with proprietary licensed content, this is the first major effort by any online music site to truly open itself up to third-party services.

And we’ll soon open up our site to developers so that any music service can build an application to host in our gallery. And eventually artists will be able to directly publish content to our site – so fans can keep tabs on their latest blog posts, photos, music videos, live recordings, etc.

The ultimate goal is help you discover, experience, and consume your favorite music online as easily as possible. So go out there and enjoy the music.

Michael Spiegelman
Head of Yahoo! Music

Tagged: news, open, yahoo! music

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5 Comments Add your own

Marky | April 7th, 2009 at 1:07 pm

Very nice, however very limited.

Music is not just pop. Where are the many other types of music? Classical, world, folk, etc.

Harrison Powers | April 7th, 2009 at 11:17 pm

Nice to see last.fm implementation!

Mario Sergio | April 9th, 2009 at 2:41 am

Cool, now the Radio works on a Macintosh!
Thanks god!

Medyum | June 2nd, 2009 at 3:00 am

Nice to see last.fm implementation!

hikaye | July 7th, 2009 at 7:51 am

Very nice, however very limited.

Music is not just pop. Where are the many other types of music? Classical, world, folk, etc.