AfterDawn: News

Rhapsody buys up Yahoo music service

Yahoo has announced that it is selling its digital music subscription service to Rhapsody America in an effort to revamp its struggling music strategy.

Yahoo Music will still offer its music videos, internet radio and music downloads but subscribers to the
Yahoo Music Unlimited service will be moved to Rhapsody. There was no financials discussed but Yahoo did say the deal is expected to close by the end of Q2 2008.



Music.yahoo.com is the most popular online music destination with 20 million monthly visitors but the subscription service only has 400,000 customers.

Yahoo senior vice president Scott Moore notes that the company decided to sell because "we made a strategic decision to focus on the mass audience".

Currently, Rhapsody has just under 1 million subscribers and the deal should make them far and away the market leader.

"This takes away a competitor, and gives Rhapsody potentially some marketing muscle," says Jupiter analyst David Card. "This is good for Rhapsody."

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 4 Feb 2008 18:57

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• 8 comments

• logan1957

  After reading this article, I'm glad I don't subscribe to Yahoo's Unlimited Music. Rhapsody is nothing more than a cheap piece of crap that should have been put out of it's misery years ago. If you've ever subscribed to their "so-called" free trial you'll know what I mean. Once you get in their clutches it's almost impossible to get out. You have to go to the Rhapsody website and look under unsubscribe, then spend the next forty five minutes to an hour looking for the toll free number to dump them. They don't have one piece of good music on their site and for the life of me I can't see where Yahoo thinks that THIS is a good business decision.

  4.2.2008 19:41 #1

• snowlock

  Originally posted by logan1957: ...I can't see where Yahoo thinks that THIS is a good business decision.maybe they're selling off the subscription music service because it's a completely retarded, not to mention obsolete, type of service. they're pawning it off on rhapsody because they stand to gain the most out of the purchase, therefore will probably pay out the nose for it.

  4.2.2008 21:15 #2

• DXR88

  IS it me or is yahoo Disecting it self selling bits and peices to other company's.
  
  i mean after that microsoft to buy yahoo artical a cuople of days ago. this seems pretty stupid then agian i did say they could not sell off there third party extensions with out that parties consent.
  
  oh well disect away yahoo nobody will miss your bloated searh engine anyway.

  4.2.2008 23:18 #3

• Silo45

  Thats funny I just read in the paper today that Yahoo just bought out the Israeli company that was making the FireFox add-on FoxyTunes for $40 million.

  5.2.2008 02:18 #4

• chaos_zzz

  so now yahoo is not worth 45$ billion?

  5.2.2008 10:19 #5

• silk42

  Originally posted by chaos_zzz: so now yahoo is not worth 45$ billion?I guess Microsoft will have to drop their $44.6 billion bid to $44.5 billion.

  5.2.2008 10:52 #6

• SProdigy

  Rhapsody is junk. I used to use it until the dumped WMA for their proprietary RAX format. At least their music was the same bitrate, which I can't say the same for Yahoo.
  
  Yahoo's software was a ripoff of MusicMatch (which they bought) and ran incredibly slow. Rhapsody went into the toilet with their version 4 software, which has a memory leak and multiple problems with WMP 11, IE 7, Windows Vista, and the list continues.
  
  Of the services, Napster is somewhat worth it to me, since FU4WM still works for it, and they still have an "unlimited" service, which for the price, is better than getting crap from P2P services that has horrible quality, bad tags, and risks of trojan viruses. The $10 I pay Napster is money well saved from buying multiple CD's per month, and if I can't get it on Napster, I'll even drive down to the local library and "borrow" a CD for a day or two.

  5.2.2008 16:00 #7

• borhan9

  Quote:Currently, Rhapsody has just under 1 million subscribers and the deal should make them far and away the market leaderIf you can't beat them... buy them out :P

  28.2.2008 00:06 #8