Yahoo ends Music Unlimited, what about its DRM-free service in the works?
Yahoo, stuck between financial hardships and a potential Microsoft hostile takeover, has decided to kill off its Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription music service, moving those customers over to RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service. While Yahoo claims this was no easy decision, it probably was — Yahoo Music Unlimited has a relatively small user-base. It is just a small part of Yahoo’s music portal at music.yahoo.com, which gets more than 25 million unique visitors each month. Here’s the thing, though. Yahoo would be foolish not to try and leverage these millions of users to launch some kind of new service, whether that be low-price DRM-free tracks or free, ad-supported downloads (as had been rumored). As Mathew Ingram points out, simply shuttling users over to Rhapsody isn’t going to cut it. People increasingly want to be able to download DRM-free tracks to use where ever they choose, not stream DRM-laced tracks for a fee. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, reports surfaced that Yahoo
