Yahoo-new music service
The new version of Yahoo Music, unveiled on Monday, aggregates paid and free music services available on the Internet, allowing Yahoo users to access and interact with the services directly from the Yahoo site.
Yahoo Inc is partnering with other online music providers as the Internet giant tries a fresh approach to getting an edge in the evolving digital music business.
The move comes a little over a year after Yahoo announced it was shuttering its own paid-music service, and is in keeping with the company’s latest efforts to make Yahoo a more open service by integrating products and services developed by other companies.
Visitors to the Yahoo Music site will be able to select from a variety modules representing the Web’s disparate music sites, including free, radio-like streaming audio services such as Pandora and last.fm, music videos from Google Inc’s, YouTube, and paid music downloads from iTunes and Amazon.com.
Yahoo Music was the No. 2 online music site in December, with 19.6 million unique visitors, according to research company ComScore. Time Warner Inc’s AOL Music was the top site with 24.6 million visitors, while News Corp’s MySpace Music ranked third with 17.2 million visitors. The new Yahoo Music-a major strategic shift for Yahoo.
Yahoo Music General Manager Michael Spiegelman said that We really want to focus on providing the service that’s most valuable to users, and then partner with third parties to provide the entire set of music services.