Rhapsody and Yahoo!: MP3s and Free Song Playback

Some of you have been asking for details on the Rhapsody transition. We’ll be able to share more next week, but in the interim I wanted to give you a sense of the broader relationship between us and Rhapsody and some of the things we’ll be working on this summer.

I was privileged recently to attend the launch of our partner Rhapsody’s MP3 Store. We’ll be working with them to bring MP3 purchase to users of Yahoo! Music. Yahoo! has been a strong backer of DRM-free music for the past two years, since Dave Goldberg, VP and GM of Yahoo! Music at the time, told the world that DRM had failed. A year ago, Ian Rogers declared that we would no longer invest resources in a fundamentally broken system of DRM that users had rejected. Now, we’re happy to bring MP3 downloads to our site so users can purchase any one of over 5 million songs to put on their iPods.

We’re also working with Rhapsody to bring playback of songs to our site. In fact, we just released our first version of the integration, which allows you to play full-length Rhapsody tracks on-demand from within our blogs section. We’ve launched a new blog called the Rolling Stone Song of the Day that will showcase a new song every day, playable for free thanks to Rhapsody. Very cool stuff. Stay tuned for more announcements in the next few months where we’ll be able to more fully describe how this offering will be integrated throughout our site.

Enjoy!

Michael Spiegelman
Yahoo! Music