Yahoo! Search delivers free Rhapsody music playback

Stephen Withers
Friday, 19 September 2008 07:04

Your IT - Home IT

Yahoo! gets a more attractive search engine. If users turn to Yahoo! Search for specific music fixes, perhaps they'll be more likely to use it for general searches.

More search traffic means more opportunities to expose paid results, which potentially means more revenue.

Rhapsody gets additional exposure for its subscription music service, and should get some additional paying customers as a result.

"The launch of full-song playback in Yahoo! Search brings us closer to realizing Yahoo! Music's vision of making the web playable and removing the barriers that prevent people from clicking play and hearing music," said Michael Spiegelman, head of Yahoo! Music.

Over at Rhapsody,  vice president of business management Neil Smith added "The integration of Rhapsody playback into Yahoo! Search is a major step toward our goal of delivering 'Music Without Limits' to consumers across the Web.

"The integration between Rhapsody and Yahoo! eliminates additional steps that previously served as a barrier to connecting consumers with artists and their music."

More to the point, such barriers act as a disincentive for those consumers to part with their money.

The Yahoo! Search results box also contains a "More songs" link, which leads to a list of tracks available for purchase from Yahoo!'s Windows-only Y! Music online store.

Additional links connected to other related Yahoo! resources and searches such as lyrics.

How might Google strike back? Well, YouTube seems to contain video clips to many songs free of charge already, and Google does return YouTube listings in its search results. 

YouTube is already international, and you can choose to watch the video or keep it in the background and just listen to the audio instead - though the sound quality I've experienced is not as good as Rhapsody's. Anyway, it wouldn't seem too hard for Google to giving officially sanctioned clips more prominence in search results.

But anything done to make search engines better by delivering more accurate results and bringing the desired content closer to the user sounds pretty good to us!