Yahoo introduced a new version of its Yahoo Music artist homepages today, which now include links to YouTube videos, Pandora radio stations, Last.fm, and photos from Flickr. Yahoo also plans to open up its API so that others can build applications for Yahoo Music, and, at a later point, artists will be able to create their own customized pages on Yahoo Music as well. Thanks to its drag-and-drop interface, users can easily customize the new artist homepages to their own liking.
Yahoo killed its own music subscription service last year, and besides giving users more options to explore new music on its site, the company is clearly also thinking about cutting costs by promoting other services without having to worry about licensing costs itself. Indeed, as Eliot Van Buskirk points out, this brings Yahoo back to its core mission of organizing the Web’s content.
Flickr and YouTube
One nice feature about the Flickr integration is that, by default, it is set to search for Creative Commons licensed pictures. As we reported last month, Flickr is the largest repository of CC-licensed photos, and it is nice to see that Yahoo is making good use of this in its own products. The YouTube player is buried at the bottom of the page, while videos from Yahoo Music are at the top of the page, though users can easily rearrange the layout of the site.
Nice Redesign, But Will Users Care?
Overall, this is a nice redesign and it should serve Yahoo Music’s current users well. Other music companies, including eMusic, also introduced similar updates lately, though the question will be if enough consumers are still interested in a site like Yahoo Music. After all, YouTube has become the default site for looking at music videos already (except for in countries where Google is fighting with the representatives of local copyright holders). If users want to go to Last.fm, why would they feel the need to stop by at Yahoo Music first?
