Yahoo! Music Relaunch

Hey all,

I haven’t posted in a while, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. Quite busy in fact: for the last several months we’ve been working on a new platform for Yahoo! Music.

Today I’m happy to announce the re-launch of Yahoo! Music, with a focus on a new platform for bringing the best of the music web to our users. The principal focus of the re-launch is our new Artist Pages, which will now bring you content from Rhapsody, iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, and Ticketmaster, in addition to Yahoo! Music Videos, Flickr photos and other Yahoo!-provided content.

Yahoo! has been talking a lot about openness in the past several months, and how we’re well-positioned to help users to successfully navigate the web. This strategy is very applicable to digital music: when I started at Yahoo! Music in December of 2003, services like MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm and Pandora didn’t exist. Now users have a wide array of choices, offering music videos, radio, on-demand streaming, downloads and concert information.

This presents an obvious challenge to Yahoo! to remain relevant in music. Through this new platform we’ll continue to remain an important source of music information and media to the more than 20 million users who visit music.yahoo.com each month. What we realized was simple: we don’t have to be the primary provider of these services in order to bring them to our users. Last.fm and Pandora have great online radio services. They compete with our own LAUNCHcast Radio, but offer different experiences: some users may prefer our radio offering, while others may gravitate to one of the others. What we want to do is to offer users choices: if you want to get your music from iTunes, that’s ok. And if you prefer Amazon or Rhapsody, that’s ok with us too.

Some of you may wonder if we’re limiting choice to only the largest music services out there. It’s true that our initial launch focuses on the major music providers, since we wanted to make sure that the most-used music products were represented in our new site. However our roadmap for the new Artist Pages will enable us to continue opening up. Over the next few months, we expect to add more modules and services to help round out the offering. After that, we’ll open up our APIs so that third-party developers can add their applications to our Widget Gallery and users can access their features on our site. Finally, we’ll be completely opening up to artists and labels so they can directly upload content to the Artist Pages. At that point we’ll have a fully open system that enables consumers, artists and music services to interact with each other through our site.

Underlying this approach is a simple philosophy about Yahoo! Music’s place in the world of digital music. MySpace Music is doing a great job of providing the ‘voice of the artist’ and enabling artists to promote themselves. YouTube will be developing a deep offering around music videos. iTunes and Amazon are great at fulfilling demand: if you know what you want, you can go to these services and easily buy songs. Rhapsody owns the subscription space, while Last.fm and Pandora have top-notch custom radio offerings. If you want to read some amazing artist biographies, check out Wikipedia: the Bob Dylan page is a work of art.

But if I go to Wikipedia, I can’t play Bob Dylan’s songs. If I go watch some great videos from The Chemical Brothers on YouTube, I can’t listen to their radio station on Last.fm. And the MySpace Music page for a band doesn’t show you objective news on an artist, and only allows you to buy music from their preferred provider. What if that’s not your preferred provider?

So there’s a pretty clear opportunity for us here: to help bring together the best of the music web, everything the web knows about an artist, to our users. We want to give our users everything the web has to offer, in a way that’s curated and makes sense for the world of music.

Along the way, I think we can do something big for the artist community. MP3 stores have been great at fulfilling demand. What we want to do is to be a driver of demand. Music sales was once a $30B business. Last year digital downloads was a less than $3B business. As my friend Mark Walker says, the gap there is the opportunity for innovation. Will downloads allow artists to completely cross that gap? I don’t think so. But I do think that if you provide an opportunity for fans to get interested in a band through reading about the artist, checking out photos and getting exposed to their videos; and then you allow them to stream their music and listen to them on the radio; and then you present the opportunity to buy music, concert tickets and merchandise, that you can help grow the music market and enable artists to better make a living from music.

I was on a panel several weeks ago at Digital Music Forum East and my co-panelist Richard Gottehrer from The Orchard was asked: in a world where analog dollars are turning into digital pennies, what should an artist do? His response? “Make more pennies.” I agree 100%. The digital world provides artists with unparalleled opportunity to make music, and make money from music. You provide great music, we’ll provide the platform to reach an audience.

I’ve been asked by a lot of people if this means that we’re getting our of the direct content business, especially since we transitioned Yahoo! Music Unlimited to Rhapsody and are now running LAUNCHcast Radio off the CBS Radio platform.

My answer is: absolutely not. We’re just changing where we allocate our focus.

We still offer over 40,000 music videos (now they’ll appear alongside videos from YouTube on our artist pages). Our music blogs are doing astoundingly well: there’s a real hunger for the contextualization of content out there. When we launched the music blogs late last year, they got 1.8M users during the first month. In February, our music blogs got 13.6M users, driven by coverage of the Grammys and big music news. Growth of almost 12M users in a little over a year shows how important the human touch is in sorting through music and news and making it relevant to people. We’re also not stopping producing great original content. Pepsi Music is alive and well on our site, and we look forward to the launch of a new emerging artists program in the next few weeks.

So please head over to our site, search for your favorite bands, and check out our new offering. We hope you like it. As always, feel free to leave comments below. We always read them.

Michael Spiegelman
General Manager
Yahoo! Music