Yahoo Music Revamp

Yahoo today unveiled a reworked, public beta version of Yahoo Music that significantly changes the company's philosophy on content. The new version serves as a central hub for third-party music services and will let users buy songs from a number of sources, including Amazon and iTunes. It likewise collects Internet radio streams from Last.fm and Pandora as well as music videos on YouTube.

In addition to highlighting content itself, Yahoo also has a recommendation engine and has individual artist pages that put all relevant music and videos in a single area. About 500,000 artists will receive this treatment, or roughly twice as many as the previous version of the site.

The approach reverses Yahoo's approach in past years, which centered on its own music store. Poor sales led to the company shuttering the store and promptly triggering a public backlash as it initially tried to shut down the servers managing copy protection with only short notice. The move would have locked many users out of their music if they had to reinstall Windows or setup a new PC. A compromise led to Yahoo transferring many of these users to RealNetworks' Rhapsody.

By Electronista Staff