Yahoo, ian rogers, deals, digital music, napster, realnetworks

Anyone want to buy a music subscription service? Anyone? Anyone?

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Yahoo may be looking to sell its music subscription service. The move makes sense: Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo Music, declared in October that he was done inconveniencing users with the digital restrictions labels required for online music subscriptions. Subscriptions simply haven't materialized as the profitable business model for artists, labels, and services alike that many had imagined. Freeing itself of the failed model will allow Yahoo to focus on free, ad-supported music. The only problem now is dumping the old service.

The only serious potential buyers are RealNetworks, though they may have fallen out of buyout talks already, and Napster, which continues to perform poorly and just recently began to shift its strategy away from subscriptions, too. Getting out of the subscription business is probably a necessary move for Yahoo, but the company may just have to settle for mothballing the operation. Good riddance.

2:00 PM on Tue Jan 8 2008
By Tim Faulkner
933 views
7 comments

Comments

It Must Be Take a Worm... at 02:51 PM on 01/08/08
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Hmm. I actually really like Y! Music Unlimited. Must be only me.
ellswrth at 03:19 PM on 01/08/08
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I like it too. It's a little clunky when it's loading, but once you've got it up and running it's pretty impressive.
eporter at 03:23 PM on 01/08/08
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I like Y! Music Unlimited too. Last spring I signed up for 2 years of their to go service for the price of 1 year. I hope they don't kill it.
tokemak at 04:20 PM on 01/08/08
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It might be the DRM, or it might be the 50% price increase they imposed after year 1.
WagCurious at 04:43 PM on 01/08/08
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Yahoo made a brilliant move with the Launch.com acquisition, but then the "not invented here" mentality kicked in and that stupid subscription service was the only thing visitors could find at music.yahoo.com for the longest time. With the death of subscription music you can finally find the "create your own station" button (which brings up the old Launch.com service). The Launch guys figured out ratings and recommendations waaaay back when. The service is excellent at choosing music for you. I just can't believe it took Yahoo this many years to realize it should be their primary music offering.
Winston Smith at 05:12 PM on 01/08/08
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I subscribe to the service but I haven't actively used it for months. Not because of the DRM issues, but because I find their service difficult to navigate. It takes me a long time to find anything of interest due to the lack of a powerful search or tagging.

Seems like they stopped innovating on the software post-acquisition and just concentrated on rebranding it.
macbeach at 05:24 PM on 01/08/08
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Yahoo has purchased so many innovative things over the years and then slowly killed them (unlike Microsoft that just puts a bullet through their heads right away).

I had, at various times: Yahoo as an ISP, pager service, movie content, web hosting service, online fax, e-mail... and lesser things. In every case no sooner had they suckered me into paying for some advanced features than the service would be discontinued or pawned off to a "partner" that stopped supporting it.

Yahoo management has about the attention span of a gnat. Their technology on the other hand... well it sorta sucks too.

I really hope they merge with Microsoft. The companies make such a nice couple.