LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS

Posted by spiegs, December 4, 2008 at 2:03 am, in YMusicBlog General. 9 Comments

Hey everyone,

Today Yahoo! Music made a big announcement: we’ll be partnering with CBS Radio to offer a jointly operated radio service to our users, which will be called LAUNCHcast Radio powered by CBS.

This will replace our existing service by moving radio to the CBS Interactive platform, with CBS providing the content, radio player and advertising. Our content team will continue to program our wide array of 150 radio stations using the CBS programming tools.

Though we’re announcing this today, the first release will take place on Feb. 12th, 2009, with subsequent releases afterwards to add features and functionality.

I’d like to walk you all through the rationale for this and then talk through the changes to the product.

In the past year and a half, the cost of operating Internet radio has changed drastically. There have been a series of court decisions, one in March of 2007 and one in April of 2008 that greatly increased the cost of Internet radio, to the point where we would be losing a lot of money if we continued to operate LAUNCHcast in its current form next year.

Yahoo! has never made a lot of money from Internet radio: it’s generally been a consumer feature and not a big profit center. However, we really couldn’t afford to pay the new rates, so we therefore faced a choice: either cripple the product to greatly reduce listenership, or find a partner with strengths in radio and different economics.

CBS Radio and Yahoo! started a discussion about the future of web radio several months ago. At the time, we were very impressed by their platform. CBS has a long tradition in the radio space, and has recently invested heavily in developing a great platform for the delivery of Internet radio. They’ve improved their offering by adding Last.fm and adding it to their family of companies.

The most critical part of our discussion was to ensure that any potential partner was committed to Internet radio and its users. CBS clearly has that commitment and is in it for the long haul.

CBS also has a great understanding of how to develop an excellent radio product. They’ve taken their deep knowledge of radio and built a platform that enables sophisticated programming, and through Last.fm they have access to great personalization technology.

So how will this affect users of LAUNCHcast Radio? When we flip the switch in February, here’s what you’ll see change:
- For the first time, the new ‘LAUNCHcast powered by CBS’ player will work on Firefox and on Macs, bringing LAUNCHcast radio to all of you who don’t use Internet Explorer. Yes, this is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, and it’s finally here.
- We’ll keep programming 150 radio stations for your enjoyment. You may see the content change slightly as we adjust to the new tools and catalog, but for the most part we’ll be offering the same radio stations, which will be programmed by our team here at Yahoo! Music using the CBS tools. All of these stations will now be free.
- We’ll continue to offer artist fan radio, which plays music related to an artist that you select. This will be offered as part of the redesigned artist pages we’ll be launching early next year.
- We’re going to be phasing out LAUNCHcast Plus. For all of you subscribers, we’ll be offering refunds for the remaining length of your subscription when we make the change on February 12. We will be making all subscription stations absolutely free, and will offer all audio at the higher quality bitrate.
- The major change you’ll see is that our beloved customized LAUNCHcast Radio will be going away. We spent a long time trying to figure out how to get this to work with the CBS platform, but unfortunately it wasn’t technically feasible. I understand that many of you have invested long hours in building your radio station, but the fact is that due to the increasing rates, we can’t continue to offer this service. Your ratings will continue to be accessible and those ratings will power recommendations of songs and music videos on our homepage, as well as your personalized music video station. We’ll also be introducing some social functionality in the next few weeks which will allow you to use your ratings to share music with friends across Yahoo!. Next year, we’ll be collaborating with CBS and Last.fm to redesign a set of personalized functionality for our site, as it’s something we certainly view as very important.

So that’s what we’re up to. Please feel free to post questions in the comments or refer to our FAQs for more info. We’ll try to answer all the questions as best we can.

Thanks,

Michael Spiegelman
General Manager, Yahoo! Music

9 Comments »

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  1. I always thought Yahoo! should combine with Last.FM.

    Their social features are something you should have had a long time ago.
    It sad the new rates killed the lucrative nature of web radio but Im glad you were able to find a way to survive.

    Would love to have my OVER 10,000 ratings to mean something since you guys shucked me over to Rhapsody.
    ;)

    Comment by resource — December 4, 2008 #

  2. I agree with the previous commenter. I would be nice to give users access to their ratings to possibly use elsewhere. It was bad enough the ratings didn’t transfer over to Rhapsody. I had 3,795 total ratings. You have to remember you users rated those songs one by one and put a lot of effort into that service.

    Hopefully you will provide an export tool, but I won’t hold out as it’s obvious you’ve been leaving your users high and dry lately. It’s sad to see the personalized radio service go.

    Comment by mhusson — December 4, 2008 #

  3. Hey resource and mhusson,

    We will definitely be creating ways to access your ratings and use them both on Yahoo! and off Yahoo!. We want to make them even more useful to powering personalization across the web.

    Regarding the ‘high and dry’ comment – how is the radio transition leaving people ‘high and dry’? The changing royalty and publishing rates are way beyond our control. We’re aiming to provide the best product possible, but we can’t operate a service at a huge loss, no matter how much we all love it. I’ve been using LAUNCHcast for over five years, so believe me I’m sympathetic as a user and would love to continue to offer customized radio, but it’s unfortunately not possible with the ASCAP and Sound Exchange rates. Sorry, but that’s the honest truth.

    Michael

    Comment by spiegs — December 4, 2008 #

  4. Hi spiegs.
    My comment about leaving users “high and dry” is in response to the killing off of Yahoo! Music Jukebox and Yahoo! Music Unlimited. I have been a launchCAST subscriber for five years or so and when YMU came out I loved it. Even though I was paying for YMU I still mainly listened to my personal launchCAST station. Spending years rating songs artists and albums was great because it introduced me to tons of new music and some of my now favorite bands. I am a mac user now and was using VMWare just to run Yahoo! Music Jukebox in Windows. I suppose I was hoping for a mac friendly personalized radio experience. I was pretty excited to hear about the switch from YMU to Rhapsody at first because they have a mac-compatible player but once the day came and I realized that the 3,795 ratings I have made wouldn’t transfer over to Rhapsody and they didn’t have any equivalent to the personalized radio in the first place, I was kind of upset and ended up canceling my subscription.

    I understand that there are a lot of problems with internet radio licensing and rates and I think It’s terrible. I appreciate all your doing to try and keep alive what you have, but the one component I actually used, the feature that made me pay for service for 4 years is the one that’s getting the axe. And it seems like the data (user ratings) will still be locked up within Yahoo!. Your plug-in API for Yahoo Music Engine didn’t even let developers have access to this data in case they wanted to use it elsewhere. Hopefully what you say is true and all the work we put in rating things will pay off in some way with other services and products. It’s just that your product transitions have been pretty negative for me as a user.

    Comment by mhusson — December 4, 2008 #

  5. What I really want is Launchast availabe on satellite radio (Sirius, XM).
    I would pay for that.

    Comment by cruttley — April 30, 2009 #

  6. [...] we are still committed to creating a personalized experience for you on Yahoo! Music (Read Michael’s post for the rationale behind the discontinuation of customized radio). Your ratings will still be used [...]

    Pingback by The New LAUNCHcast Radio Is Here! | Inconditus — May 2, 2009 #

  7. Is this going to be similar to grooveshark.com?

    Ben

    Comment by Ben — May 9, 2009 #

  8. [...] Yahoo Music Blog LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS Posted by root 1 hour 50 minutes ago (http://ymusicblog.com) For the first time the new 39 launchcast powered by cbs 39 player will work on firefox regarding the 39 high and dry 39 comment how is the radio transition powered by wordpress theme based on pool theme design by borja fernandez Discuss  |  Bury |  News | Yahoo Music Blog LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo Music Blog LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS | Wood TV Stand — May 31, 2009 #

  9. [...] Yahoo Music Blog LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS Posted by root 21 minutes ago (http://ymusicblog.com) Nature of web radio but im glad you were able to find a way to survive regarding the 39 high and dry 39 comment how is the radio transition leaving people 39 high and dry 39 the changing royalty and publishing rates are way beyond our control powered by w Discuss  |  Bury |  News | Yahoo Music Blog LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS [...]

    Pingback by Yahoo Music Blog LAUNCHcast Powered by CBS | Hammock Stand — June 1, 2009 #

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