Yahoo Music
Yahoo Music was a brand under which Yahoo provided music services including Internet radio, a digital music store, music streaming service, media player software, and original programming. Yahoo Music was sold to Rhapsody in early 2008.
Products
Yahoo Music Radio
In June 2001, after the bursting of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo acquired LAUNCH Media, which was facing financial difficulty, for $12 million. In addition to a website with music news and videos, it provided an Internet radio service that allowed users to create personalized Internet radio stations by rating songs selected by a recommender system. Users were also able to listen to music from 150 preset Internet radio stations. The service offered both an advertising supported free version and a subscription fee-based premium version. At the time of the acquisition by Yahoo, the service had 7.4 million users.In December 2008, the service was integrated into CBS Radio due to a rise in royalty rates, with CBS taking full control of the service, including advertising and sales and adding compatibility with Firefox and Safari.
The service was integrated with iHeartRadio in June 2012, providing listeners exclusive access to music events such as the iHeartRadio Music Festival. The service was shut down in early 2014 without any announcement.
Musicmatch Jukebox
Musicmatch was a media player software that also operated an internet radio service, which allowed users choose the artist they want to listen to but not the song. MusicMatch Jukebox was launched in 1997 and was bundled with the iPod Classic as its music manager until the introduction of iTunes for Microsoft Windows in 2003. In September 2003, the company launched a digital music store with 200,000 songs available. It had a partnership with Dell to promote the service and software.On September 14, 2004, Yahoo acquired Musicmatch Jukebox for $160 million. However, the service was not integrated well, instead stagnating. It was shut down on August 31, 2007.