Yahoo continues to outsource lots of businesses it previously built and maintained directly. Especially in music – In February they shut their subscription music service, and in September they announced a deal to allow full song playbacks through the Rhapsody service.
Next up is Yahoo’s radio product, http://music.yahoo.com/launchcast. The site today, which draws 3 million monthly unique visitors says Yahoo, allows users to listen to music based on preferred genres and artists. But Launchcast is limited only to Windows users on Internet Explorer, shutting out a large percentage of the Internet.
Next year they’ll shutter the service and relaunch with CBS Radio, much as AOL did earlier this year. CBS provides streaming for 144 owned radio stations, as well as providing some Internet-only content.
CBS will also take over ad sales for Launchcast, offering advertisers both display, video and audio ads.
The new service will roll out sometime in the first quarter of 2009. Paid subscribers to Launchcast will receive a pro-rata refund (an ad-free version of Launchcast is available for $3/month or $24/year).
I wonder if any Last.fm technology will be used in this.
The best shot Yahoo can come up with now is to relaunch its entire establishment, otherwise they are sinking further than I thought: http://www.nichea.info
if Yahoo’s around still
It is a shame that Yahoo has so many good web properties and isn’t developing them in the the way they should. This is just another example.
Launchcast is the perfect streaming application. Bummer. It’s the only Yahoo premium service I use at this point.
Kipp … 100% agree with you. I’ve long wondered why they didn’t push Launchcast harder.
I guess they don’t need someone to do a hostile takeover to pick the business in pieces and sell them off – they do it *themselves*. No healthy business ind understands their ’strategy’.
This is VERY disappointing. Launchcast is the best custom streaming service around. IMO it’s better than Slacker, Pandora, etc.
They simply didn’t keep it updated to the latest technology, leaving out Mac and Linux users.
If this is going to simply mimic AOL’s offering, who is going to use it?
u mean next month?
It is really sad that Yahoo didn’t push the technology and the product. Laucnhcast could have been a solid community/user tool. I can’t help but wonder what stock holders are thinking of the Yahoo ’strategies’ of late.
My understanding is the whole point of internet radio is that it is different then radio you get over the airwaves. Why would I want to listen to the same crappy CBS stations on the internet when there are so many more choices and better stations.
This truly sucks. Now Launchcast, with its customizable radio station, will be gone forever and end up like, ugh…AOL Radio. This i such bullshit. I’m starting to re-think my using of Yahoo services.
I’ve been a LaunchCast Plus subscriber for a couple years. The main reasons I enjoyed it and paid for it was because I could select my own music preferences and didn’t have to listen to commercials.
CBS will not offer these features, so there is no way I will subscribe to this – not even for free. Sorry CBS, no customer here.
Can anyone recommend another ad free music service where I can set preferences?
Total crap! The only thing I ever subscribed to on the web for years and years, now it’s gone. I have no use for the product they are offering to replace it with. WHat a waste!
I’ve been with LaunchCast plus for serveral years and have rated thousands of songs resulting in a darn good tailored music station. I am really going to miss this service. I have started to build a service on Pandora but it isn’t quite the same.
LaunchCast was pretty much the only thing unique and worthwhile about Yahoo. Hopefully someone else will adopt the model. It’s too good of an idea to just go away. I’ll gladly pay more per month for a service like this than Yahoo/CBS/Sony are ever going to make by forcing me to listen to and look at ads. I’m sad.
Really Yahoo? This is the Yahoo feature I use these days, and will no longer be doing that if my station goes away. Great thinking Yahoo, drive all your users to Pandora.
If all your users wanted generic stations, don’t you think they would have gone to AOL’s music by now?
Launchast is fantastic. I’m going to miss all the great music I’ve discovered and rediscovered.
Pandora is vomit compared to launchcast. No banning of artists or any useful tools to shape your station. I’ve spent hours trying to make it listenable … the crap they play certainly isn’t worth having to camp out on the skip button all day.
This blows. I’ve been using launch since it was launch way before yahoo began to eff with it. I’m sad to see my 30,000 plus songs go buh bye. Guess that I’ll finally have to get that mp3 player going again.
Launchcast has been the most brilliant service anyone in the music business could have offered. I’ve discovered many new artists and songs. It enriched my life and now it will be gone. Whatever happened to the idea of having computers adapt to users rather than the other way around? Easy to use, smart radio. R.I.P.
Sad. Three years of rating songs, atists, albums down the drain. What a great service that I used for 98% of my home listening. I’d gladly pay for it. So effortless, just turn it on and skip as much as I want. No looking for and loading CDs or songs in my computer. Pandora’s personal station tailoring isn’t as good and it limits skips to 5 per hour I believe. Doesn’t seem like it supplies as much new music either.
Count me in on being really let down by Yahoo. I had over 50,000 ratings and listened every day – all day. I loved my Launchcast. I’m searching now for a new online music source. I can’t listen to just one genre anymore. It gets too old too fast.
A music program that could allow you to just mix genres would be good enough, but I haven’t found it yet. I’m still looking – let me know if anyone finds one.
Thanks and I’ll check back if I find something good.
I’m pretty bummed too. I suppose I’ll give the new format a chance but I’m not optimistic. I’m not looking forward to trying to find a replacement to listen to during my work day.
Goodbye Yahoo then
The only reason I have Yahoo Messenger is for Launchcast.
Launchcast is the best music service in existence. It is the only one to offer effective customisation, and I can listen to it all over the world, I just have to pay from a US bank acct.
The CBS is not a replacement, it doesnt offer customisation therefore it is a very poor substitute, actually it isnt a substitute at all =/
I have spent a fortune on CDs of music I first heard of on Launchcast, no more.
Rhapsody is unavailable outside US, so thats no bloody use at all. Pandora is unavailable outside US. LastFM customisation is a poor second to Launchcast I tried it and discarded it in favour of Launchcast
Man I’m pissed off, time to uninstall YM
S
I can’t get my head round the idea of not having this service anymore. I have discovered soooo many old and new bands from Launchcast, I always saw it as the place where musically hidden gems would pop out at you and without having to siv through most of the trash produced today. I used to love listening to the late night John Peel hour to find these types of gems, and although just a program I felt Launchpad was the only place that could make the music personal again.
Launchpad was great RIP…que the Napster like cloning
The entire reason I joined Launchcast was the fact that I was so burned out listening to monopolized radio (ahem Clear Channel, CBS, etc). I will NOT be using the new service. At this point my station is so customized and tailored to my specific tastes I don’t think I’ll be able to recreate it anywhere again. Hell, I thought I knew what music I liked… until I joined Launch and found an appreciation for music and genres that I never knew existed. SOMEBODY PLEASE COME UP WITH A SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE LIKE THIS AGAIN AND SOON!
I just found this out today when trying to listen to my station, which was fine this morning. I’ve been listening to yahoo radio for six years and have well over 10,000 ratings, all of which it seems CBS will ignore while they play Brittany Spears interlaced with commercials. What a trade off. The 30 some dollars a year launchcast cost was well worth it-I’d have happily paid double or triple that, since I usually have it on all day at work.
Gah, I just discovered this out today too, when my LC radio started playing commercials out of nowhere. This is ridiculous! I LOVED how customizable LC is, for all the reasons everyone else already said, and more. I have a very varied mix of music likes, from country to pop rock to movie soundtracks to stuff from the 50s & 60s, etc etc.. I used to listen to iTunes radio, which is free and has no restrictions at all, but can be a hassle to keep changing the stations, especially when they are all sorted by only one genre per station at a time.. so when I discovered LC, it was like, whoa. So awesome!
RiP indeed, Launchcast Plus. What a shame.
Oh, and here’s the link to MY station, lol:
http://music.ya...sp?u=1883853352
Yahoo! …not. First they take over MusicMatch and run it into the ground; now they do the same with LAUNCHcast… MusicMatch had the best music player and library manager around (v8), and LAUNCHcast Plus was like having a music library online. Downer.
http://exonome.com/YMRS/ has a JAVA Applet that lets you download your ratings. What you then do with them, I dunno.
Typed to fast, it’s http://exonome.com/YMSR
These companies have their heads so far up their rears its abominable. This was one of the greatest invents of the internet and I would have gladly accepted price increase to keep it. They did a terrible job of letting folks know it existed. Yahoo is losing me forever. I won’t even listen to the new service for free. Its back to my cd collection. I wish there was a way to know if yahoo execs have any idea how people like us feel or if they’d even care. That service was worth more than satellite radio will ever be. Anyone here want to start a company and actually market it? Let me know!
Well I really sad now I just logged on my yahoo messanger and fired up the launchcast and it was different I was like again something has changed whats going on here. Started playing around with it and was very dissappointed I used this for 5 years or more. Just last year I subscribed for a 1 year deal got tired of the charge on the card all the time. Well not I just wasted some money. I loveed it cause I could skip over song that I like and now I cant even do that whats up with that. I gess ill be looking for something else. It was just so easy to use not a pain to log in what a joke seems like every thing I been liking lately is just getting redone or sold or going out of bussiness.
Well slacker radio seems to be the best option so far. I like pandora radio, but it seems slacker is more user friendly and discovers more music for me. I’m just bummed that all those ratings are gone.
CBS? Is this one of the same outfits that touts the NWO line, and actually scripts NEWS beofre it actually happens for kicks by the elite? The only problem is, they keep getting caught in the act. Such as how did Wolf Blitzer of CNN know more about the plane that landed in the Hudson River, than everyone knew after 5 hours. Hugh Blitz? Or that on 9/11 the BBC reported that they learned Building 7 had collapsed, but yet it was still standing behind the reporter in the background. The reporter even knew the name of the building AND how many stories there were…. Ugh… I thought there was confusion on 9/11. Or that FOX NEWS jumped the gun on the latest Space Shuttle disaster……No worrries….. The World is tanking and the elite are losing control. The Elite are a joke…. cause THAT is what they will become.
Launchast was the best music service ever, and the only internet radio I have ever liked. It will be sadly missed.
I was glad to pay for the service. I was waiting for them to make Launchast available on Sirius or XM satellite radio. Being able to listen to Launchcast while driving – I would have never listened to another radio station again!
The customized stations must have moved to http://play.it but you have to have an acct w/ them.