Yahoo Japan's iTunes hookup

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 18 June 2007 13:07

Home IT

Yahoo Japan has begun featuring music downloads from Apple's iTunes Store.

Yahoo Japan, the most popular portal in the country among home users, previously featured downloads from Mora, an online music service linked with Sony. Access to Mora is still available, but iTunes is now the default provider.

iTunes features prominently on the Yahoo Japan Music home page, with buttons that link to the appropriate iTunes Store page within the iTunes application. Once there, the track or album is just a mouseclick away.

Users can restore Mora as the default music store by logging into their Yahoo Japan accounts and setting a preference.

While no financial details of the arrangements have been disclosed, the deal can reasonably be expected to improve Apple's already impressive position in the music 'download to own' business, as well as Yahoo Japan's affiliate revenue from music sales.

Yahoo is a minority shareholder in Yahoo Japan, owning about one-third of the company. The largest stake is held by Softbank.