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Yahoo wins appeal of music-streaming case

A three-judge panel ruled Friday that Yahoo will not have to pay up every time it plays a song on its Internet radio service, affirming an earlier verdict.

In what is being seen as a defeat for the music industry, Yahoo Music was not deemed "interactive" enough to require the company to negotiate with record companies for the rights to play songs over the Internet. Instead, according to Reuters, it merely has to pay licensing fees to digital music rights organization SoundExchange.

The suit arose way back in 2001, when a division of Sony sued Launch Media claiming … Read more

CBS adds Launchcast to its online radio arsenal

A quick note from the continuing Yahoo drama: today the company agreed to sell off Launchcast, its streaming music service, to CBS. (Disclosure: CBS is the publisher of News.com.) This continues Yahoo's movement out of the music biz--it sold its subscription service to RealNetworks back in February.

More interesting than Yahoo's exit is the buyer. Launchcast now sits alongside Last.fm and AOL Radio (which is best-loved on the iPhone) in CBS's online radio arsenal. According to this report in All Things Digital, Launchcast will become more like AOL Radio, focusing primarily on pre-programmed playlists and … Read more

Yahoo hands Launchcast to CBS Radio

Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it has entered an agreement with CBS Radio that will see the media giant gain full control over Yahoo's Launchcast Radio, a service that provides more than 150 free stations of music, talk, news, and sports content.

Launchcast will be combined with CBS Radio's current offering, and all advertising sales responsibility will be passed from Yahoo to CBS. A new CBS Radio player will be integrated into the Yahoo Music site, and most importantly, Launchcast will finally be available to Firefox, Mac, and Safari users. The software was previously available only to Windows … Read more

Would Microsoft kill Yahoo Music?

One of the first things Microsoft did when launching the new Zune was kill the 2-year-old MSN Music download service.

The business reasons were plain: MSN Music was a PlaysForSure service, but the Zune wasn't PlaysForSure-compatible, and it came with its own music download service, integrated into the Zune software.

Sure, there's still something with the brand name MSN Music, but it's basically a shell--a few music videos, some promotional tie-ins with Zune (through a program called Ignition), and a radio station powered by Pandora.

So what might that mean for Yahoo Music, if Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo … Read more