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

After two years of exclusive Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music performances with A-list acts from the Foo Fighters to Kelly Clarkson to Buddy Guy, this October — for the first time — Yahoo! Music took this show of ours on the road to meet up with a little band called Coldplay.

Three thousand miles from the Los Angeles stage that was home for nearly 50 prior shows, we renewed our appreciation for roadies by traveling to New York City, taking over Hammerstein Ballroom, and playing host to one of the biggest bands in the world. Now, you can take a Nissan Live Sets show out of LA, but rest assured, we added all the usual ingredients our viewers love to this historic venue: 300 of the band’s biggest fans (including Jay-Z and Beyonce), a candid audience Q&A, and a rockin’ playlist of fan favorites and brand new tracks.

The result was not only one of the most electrifying, contagiously head-bobbing concert events we’ve ever produced, but also a major milestone for the program. For the first time in Nissan Live Sets history, Coldplay’s global super-stardom gave us the opportunity to launch this exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime performance on Yahoo! Music in 12 different countries –- simultaneously.

Even though only 300 lucky fans got to catch this in person, pretty much the whole world can view the entire performance today on Yahoo! Music. If you need a teaser, check out a couple of the highlights below.

Enjoy –- and viva la Coldplay!!!!