Yahoo Music opening pages to YouTube, others
Yahoo is opening its Artist Pages to others' content.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo plans to fire up a revamped version of its Artist Pages on Tuesday, a service that lets people add content from iTunes, YouTube, and other sites to the Yahoo Music site that previously only had Yahoo's own content.
The site publishes information including tour dates and music videos for more than 500,000 artists and lets people download and purchase music. Now the site will blend in information from non-Yahoo sources, the company said, part of an effort to make the site a better starting point.
First come modules from iTunes, Amazon.com, Last.fm, Rhapsody, Pandora, YouTube, and Yahoo itself, Yahoo said. (Last.fm is a part of CBS, which also owns CNET News.) Later, people will be able to create their own artist pages.
The move is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, which aims to open Yahoo's properties up to others' applications and content and to make it easier for other Web sites to incorporate Yahoo's content. With YOS, the company hopes to increase the number of Yahoo users and the amount they use Yahoo's services.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Web pioneer, whose dominance has been challenged by Google, Facebook, and others, has been demonstrating new YOS features for months. One element of the revamped Yahoo Music work will be that actions people take, such as marking a band as a favorite, can be shared with their social connections.
Yahoo is optimistic about the effort. "Artist Pages leverages the scale of the Web and Yahoo's massive audience to create something totally new, open, social, and original which we believe will attract a new generation of music fans and Web users to Yahoo Music," said Yahoo Music chief Michael Spiegelman in a statement.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
MM10 is still (I have it still on a brand new netbook) the only music software with a utility to allow the user to export a music library to a database file. This can be very useful.
>>RSM