Yahoo shutters music service, allies with Rhapsody
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The search provider has decided to end its music service, opting instead to send its business to Real.
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At least one online music service without digital rights management restrictions is launching.
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Yahoo suffered availability problems today that affected its home page as well as other Yahoo Web sites and services for a sustained period of time.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge. Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways. An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said. Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources. "Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night. While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site. The initial response from observers has been enthusiastic. "Yahoo's new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the Internet," Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of computer book publisher O'Reilly Media Inc., wrote on his blog . "While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the Web into a programmable environment for everyone." The Pipes Web site, available throughout this morning, was nonetheless down at press time, displaying the message: "Our Pipes are clogged! We've called the plumbers!"
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Yahoo and Musicmatch today announced they have signed an agreement for Yahoo to acquire Musicmatch for approximately US$160 million in cash.
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(InfoWorld) - Virgin Group Ltd. will shut down its online music subscription and download service in the U.S. and U.K. next month, leaving one less competitor for Apple Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. In the U.K., Virgin Digital stopped selling tracks last Friday, and is no longer accepting new customers. As of Friday, only existing customers will be able to access the service, and the site will shut down for good on Oct. 19. The U.K. version of the site said users with more than one month of outstanding subscriptions will get a refund, but unused credits for song downloads should be used and won't be refunded. U.S. users of Virgin Digital will be able to use their credit on Napster LLC's music download service. The pending demise of Virgin Digital marks another casualty among online music stores, which have generally received lukewarm reception from consumers with the exception of Apple's market-leading iTunes service. Since Virgin Digital used digital rights management (DRM) technology from Microsoft Corp. to manage how songs could be played and transferred to portable devices, the service was not compatible with Apple's iPod line, which uses different DRM technology and file format. The Virgin Digital service allows customers to download tracks up to four more times to replace lost or damaged copies. Since that option will no longer be available when the store closes, the company advised customers who purchased tracks to back them up by burning the songs to a CD . Burning the tracks will let those customers re-import the tracks to the computer as MP3 files. Virgin also offered a subscription service that let people access an entire catalog of songs as long as they continued to pay the monthly fees. Those songs, which used Microsoft's DRM, would be unplayable if the person's subscription expired. Once the club closes, subscribers will also lose access to those songs. As part of the terms of subscription service, users were not allowed to burn those songs to CD. Virgin Digital officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the service's closure. The Virgin Digital store is not the only one to fold in the face of competition from Apple's iTunes -- or from illegal downloads. Last month, MTV Networks, which is owned by Viacom Inc., said it would merge its Urge music service with RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody service. Urge, which was a partnership between MTV and Microsoft launched in May 2006 that failed to effectively compete with iTunes. Â
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Yahoo is raising the cost of its online subscription music service between $1 and $3 per month, depending on the customer's plan. Initially launched in 2005 at a price of $4.99 per month, Yahoo Music Unlimited will now cost $11.99 per month when purchased annually.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo put another music track without DRM (digital rights management) on sale through its Yahoo Music service Tuesday. The Norah Jones single "Thinking About You" sells for $0.99, in MP3 format on Yahoo's music store, and in DRM-encumbered AAC format on Apple Computer's iTunes Store. Both formats will play on PCs, Macs, and the market-leading iPod portable music player, but only the MP3 version will play on other portable music players. DRM technology is used to set limits on how, when, how many times, and on what devices a file may be played. While DRM can be applied to music in AAC, ATRAC, or WMA format, it cannot be introduced into MP3 files. Yahoo first experimented withÂ selling MP3 files without DRMÂ in July, when it offered Jessica Simpson's "A Public Affair" as an MP3 file for $1.99. While that track was not tied to a particular PC or music player with DRM, the audio track was personalized to contain a first name of the purchaser's choice, picked from a list of hundreds of prerecorded names, limiting its interest to other listeners. Since then, Yahoo has sold an entire album by the artist Jesse McCartney in both MP3 and the DRM-encumbered WMA (Windows Media Audio) format, but has not published sales figures for the two formats. Some see the release of tracks in MP3 format, without DRM, as a big gamble for record labels, as nothing prevents buyers from uploading them to file-sharing networks. In reality, DRM does little to stop such behavior, but makes life harder for legitimate music users, said analyst Mark Mulligan, a vice president at Jupiter Research in the U.K. "Most of the DRM in place is not going to stop piracy. You've got limits on CD-burning, but all of that is cracked immediately if you burn it onto CD and rip it back in again. Anyone with an ounce of tech-savvy is going to know how to get around that," he said. But the fact that there's nothing to stop listeners copying and sharing MP3 files could work to record labels' advantage, said Mulligan. "It's going to be implemented more as marketing than anything else," he said. Blue Note Records, the record label promoting the Jones track, is only releasing the single, not an entire album, in MP3 format for now. If Mulligan is right, it could be just a marketing gimmick to build awareness of the album, which will go on sale in January. Major record labels are starting toÂ look more seriously at MP3 distributionÂ because of the success of eMusic.com, which Mulligan says is the second-largest online music download store in the U.S., after that of Apple. EMusic sells music from independent record labels in MP3 format.
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The controversial music download site allofmp3.com closes down but appears to reopen under a new name.
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Yahoo Inc. has eliminated the tiered pricing scheme for its hosted storage offering, providing unlimited capacity to small and mid-size businesses for $12 a month.
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Yahoo is selling its digital music subscription service to Rhapsody America - a partnership of Real Networks and MTV Networks - as it revamps its music strategy. Yahoo Music will continue to offer music videos, Internet radio and music downloads. But customers of its monthly Yahoo Music Unlimited service will be migrated to Rhapsody. No firm timetable has been set. Yahoo, which expects the deal to close by the middle of year, did not disclose terms.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's second largest music company, will this month become the last of the big four majors to drop copy protection software on music downloads, also known as digital rights management (DRM).
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Yahoo has updated its open source collaboration server software, Zimbra, now including Blackberry support and Yahoo Maps and search integration. However, if Microsoft acquires Yahoo, will this be the last update we see for Zimbra?
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Acknowledging its proprietary audio technology was a marketplace flop, Sony Corp. said Thursday it plans to shutter its Connect digital music store and open its portable media players to other formats.
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One of the first things Microsoft did when launching the Zune was get rid of the two-year-old MSN Music download service. That doesn't bode well for Yahoo Music.
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Apple&#39;s iTunes Music Store may be the current 800-pound gorilla of the online music industry (as far as paid downloads are concerned), but now Yahoo - possibly the most visited site on the Internet - is getting into the fray, paying $160 million in cash
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Sony Corp.&#39;s music unit is abandoning its CDs that use built-in technology that limits copying them, after pushing the program for two years.