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Facebook Is Reportedly Considering Digital Music
News emerged Friday that Facebook may be considering adding music to its mix. According to the New York Post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is considering getting into the digital-music business.If the report is true, it would put Facebook on the heels of MySpace's latest strategic effort to differentiate itself among youthful social networkers.Rhapsody.com, iMeem.com, iLike.com and Lala.com are among the digital-music sites Facebook is reportedly in talks with. Facebook is also said to be in talks with major music labels. It's a move that would put Facebook in competition not only with MySpace, but also Apple's iTunes Store and Amazon.com, among others. "Facebook is a serious challenger to MySpace and they would certainly want to do anything that record labels would allow them to do with advertising-supported music," said Phil Leigh, senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. "Advertising-supported revenue would be good for Facebook and certainly free access to recorded music would be good for Facebook members. It would be good for the labels, too. If the MySpace deal is working out well, then the labels would probably want to replicate that on Facebook."Streaming Music?MySpace Music streamed a billion songs within days after its Sept. 25 launch. By contrast, it took the iTunes Store nearly three years to reach that mark. MySpace admitted it doesn't know if it can keep up those numbers. Its launch was highly publicized.What's not clear is the pricing model. Would Facebook, if sells music, go with a flat price for a digital download, a subscription model, or an advertising-supported stream, as Leigh suggested? There is no lack of competition on any of those fronts. Nokia and Sony Ericsson are challenging Apple's digital-music empire with a subscription model.In a recent consumer study by Strategy Analytics, 84 percent of respondents indicated a willingness to pay for a...
Apple Wrong to Require Single Track Sales on iTunes?
iTunes vs. Kid Rock and The Music IndustryThe Wall Street Journal took a look at why some artists are keeping their music off iTunes. Because the store does not allow full album only downloads, Kid Rock, AC/DC and others have opted out. Some acts like Radiohead did it to protect the artistic integrity of their work while others are clear that their motivation is money. Single tracks don't net the same profits that albums do.read more
Say goodbye to Yahoo! Mash
On today's web, so many social sites never get off the ground because users don't easily migrate from their online communities. As much as I want MySpace to die, people will still be using it as long as their friends are using it. Yahoo's mashup social network had a promising start, but it quickly dropped off. Almost a year ago, I wrote a post about how interactive it was, and how addicted I was to it. I remember going to the site 20 times a day because other people had the ability to update my profile page. I could drag around widgets and import feeds. I actually said, “It’s more mature than MySpace, more interactive than Virb, and more interesting than Facebook.” ...
Hear the Music on Yahoo! Search
About a year ago Yahoo! Search launched a music artist shortcut to make it easier for users to find quick details about artists -- like videos, photos, sample song tracks, and even their official website links -- directly from the search results page. This evening, we're rolling out some key enhancements as part of our partnership with Rhapsody. Now, in addition to gaining access to all of the artist background that you could before, you'll also be able to play up to 25 full songs a month, as opposed to the 30-second samples from before. And, by tapping into the vast catalog of songs available on Rhapsody, we're expanding the number of audio files that are available for playback and increasing the number of tracks in the shortcut from three songs to four. If you want to look over a greater list of songs, you'll also be able to link directly to Yahoo! Music right from the shortcuts; full song playback will soon be enabled in Yahoo! Music as well, so stay tuned.
Now you'll be able to listen to Rihanna, sing along to Madonna and JT or rock out to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs without having to leave the search results page or type in a log-in. Simply click your song of choice and the new media player from Yahoo! Music, called FoxyPlayer, will launch near the bottom of the page. The player is easy-to-use and offers full functionality for song playback, like artist and song info and even an expandable playlist tab. You'll be able to continue browsing the results page while the player is in use or turn it off at any time with a single click.
Try it out and search for some of your favorites. We'll continue to work with Rhapsody to showcase more of their deep music catalog in the near future, so keep your eyes (and ears) open for even more artists and songs.For more information on our partnership with Rhapsody, check out the Music Help Pages.Greg MakrisYahoo! Search
Scratching Under the Surface of a “New” Health Search Engine
Lots of buzz this week about Healthline.com, a new vertical search engine for medical information. Chris Sherman, in his SearchDay review, quotes the company's promotional material, which indicates that the site covers "62,000 web sites with between 45-50 million pages... [and] hosted content licensed from reliable content providers." However, my own initial examination showed a site that offers little to rival the best quality ad-and-sponsorship-free medical content on the web through sites like Medline Plus. Healthline relies principally on content from popular pre-existing 3rd party .com sources that could be obtained from any commercial search engine. I conducted a search...
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