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The days of one-stop, all-encompassing portals are quickly receding, and giants like Yahoo and AOL are finally getting the memo. That includes music sub-properties, which are suddenly tearing down their walls.
In the next few weeks, Yahoo Music is planning to unveil a totally-revamped site at music.yahoo.com, one that plays nice with YouTube, Amazon, Last.fm, Flicker, Wikipedia, and others. " We really want to bring this content to users in one place," said Yahoo Music head Michael Spiegelman in an interview with Digital Music News. "We are going to be opening up Yahoo Music."
The walls will start crumbling in about six weeks, according to Spiegelman, though a specific launch date was not given. As a proxy, Spiegelman pointed to an open destination on FoxyTunes (foxytunes.com), an Israeli startup acquired by Yahoo Music earlier this year. The open template, at FoxyTunes Planet, offers artist content from the aforementioned partners, as well as Pandora, Rhapsody, and the Hype Machine. "We'll be the starting point and gateway into rich music experiences," Spiegelman continued.
And the starting point for the Yahoo Music open initiative will be the artist page. Spiegelman offered an early-stage, in-development example using U2, one that also plugged heavily into existing Yahoo Music videos and related information. That page could undergo changes ahead of the launch, though it offered a close resemblance to the FoxyTunes Planet example.
Once the artist pages are launched, Yahoo Music will open the platform up to smaller, independent and unsigned acts. That is still under development and targeted for early 2009, though the plan is to allow artists to tap into the broad Yahoo Music audience. According to the company, artists will have the power to transfer their uploaded content onto other sites, and Yahoo is currently examining ways to easily translate existing profiles from other destinations.
The far-reaching expansion will continue through 2009, and form the basis for future projects. Other aspects of the plan involve outside articles, blogs, and a broader integration of the music experience across the Yahoo site. According to Spiegelman, that will help to retain traffic, and more importantly, attention and duration of visits. "We've lost time spent and the engagement level," the executive shared. "Attention is being spread across a lot more sites."
Story by publisher Paul Resnikoff in Santa Monica, CA.
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