“Whether you prefer hard rockers or accordion-pumping folk singers, Yahoo Inc. will stick with an aggressively low $5 monthly fee in the first major marketing push for its online music service,” Michele Gershberg reports for Reuters. “After an introductory roll-out in May, Yahoo was set to announce on Thursday that it would keep its music download subscription priced well below those of competitors, such as RealNetworks Inc.’s Rhapsody and Napster Inc., in an effort to become ‘the standard online music service.'”
“Yahoo Inc. Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway said the music service had so far attracted subscribers through public relations efforts and word of mouth. The new Yahoo Music campaign will be the online media company’s most aggressive push this year, she said… Pixelated characters representing rock band Green Day and rapper Missy Elliott bounce and bop in the Yahoo Music online ads, with viewers able to move the “Mini-Pop” stars onscreen. The ads were created by agencies Soho Square and OgilvyOne, San Francisco,” Gershberg reports.
“The campaign debuts on August 28 during the MTV Video Music Awards with the tagline ‘Over A Million Songs – 5 Bucks A Month – This Is Huge.’ One television commercial shows an animated spaceship beaming up favourite musicians, then pulverizing a lederhosen-clad accordion player,” Gershberg reports. “Commercials will air on MTV and Comedy Central. Yahoo has also planned ads in a new video game from Midway Games Inc., and other nontraditional campaign efforts.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
BusinessWeek: Apple unlikely to launch music subscription service – August 15, 2005
Apple CEO Steve Jobs on Yahoo music, iPod, cellphones, ‘Halo Effect,’ viruses and more – May 23, 2005
Analyst: Yahoo’s music entry threatens Napster and RealNetworks more than Apple – May 12, 2005
Yahoo’s music play hurts Napster, RealNetworks; may force Apple to offer iTunes subscription service – May 12, 2005
Napster To Go Soon? Reports $24.3 million net loss on $17.4 million net revenue – May 12, 2005
J.P. Morgan: Yahoo music service ‘does little to break Apple’s tight grip’ on digital music market – May 11, 2005
Yahoo launches Napster To Go, Rhapsody To Go killer (takes aim at Apple’s iTunes Music Store?) – May 11, 2005
RealNetworks drops 21%, Napster plummets 30% on Yahoo music news – May 11, 2005
Study shows Apple iTunes Music Store pay-per-download model preferred over subscription service – April 11, 2005
…subscription programs did not grab the public *just* because of lacking of advertizing? Is this Yahoo hope? If you keep repeating “This is Huge” people will at the end believe it?
Yawn. Doesn’t work with iPod means it doesn’t work with 75+% of the mp3 players out there. So this is anything but huge…
WOW! I’m gonna ditch all my iTunes music, delete iTunes and get all my music from Yahoo!
…and says “hey I saw those Yahoo iTunes ads on TV. I might finally check out this iTunes thing.”
Then they go to iTunes.com and get the scoop. And Yahoo wonders where they went wrong.
And I’ll sell my iPod as well and get a Dell DJ. Do they still make them? Apparently it ‘Plays For Sure’ so it must be good cause Micro$oft say so.
YAAAAAAAAwnnn…
Yahoo blows..
and they decide to enter a market where they know nothing.. own no IP.. and have no leverage.. yawn..
What’s the point? Yahoo has a lot of money, but if other companies can’t turn a profit with subscription services that cost significantly more than $5/month, why bother at all?
The worst risk is on the subscribers: if the download company goes under or decides to can the service, the user has zero songs to show for whatever amount of money they spent. $5/month is dirt cheap, but who wants take a chance on having their music collection wiped out overnight?
$5 / month is cheap. I’m sure this will do well and will be an incentive for people NOT to buy iPods.
Who cares if Yahoo’s site becomes huge. All Apple will do is offer a subscription based fee for less. iPods & Subscription. Good bye Yahoo.
Can’t believe that no one mentioned this yet –
What happens to poor Yahoo music when Google becomes an iTunes affiliate?
Goodnight yahoo music. (Goodnight napster, goodnight moon. Goodnight Rhapsody……)
Cheap subscription services will do well but the cheaper they become the more they will evolve into the legitimate source for stolen music. Join the service for $5 then download all you want then ‘Hijack’ all that music and its yours. The cheaper the service becomes the more likely this scenario will become. I can’t see Apple going subscription because they would have to charge too much and if they tried to complete with Yahoo’s $5/mo they would start to cut into their own iTMS sales.
at $5/month…how long before someone just offers subscription music for free?…absorbing the cost with the main intent of driving millions to your site.
Uhhh…Good Luck With That! Is’s amazing what these guys will do to dominate the HUGE 20-25% of iTMS crumbs.
A million songs a month shuffled FREE. Just turn on the radio or switch to the appropriate channels on your cable tv. For buying stuff there’s iTMS.
Yahoo, even at $1 a month I’m not interested.
That’s IT’S not IS’S – Sorry. Bad Fingers, Bad Fingers!
If Yahoo was offering a subscription service for bad reality tv, then yeah, MTV would be the first place I’d go to advertise, too…
Hey, those guys at Yahoo obviously have too much money. Maybe they should start racing balloons with Richard Branson and Steve Fossett or something, and leave dealing with the music industry to people with a proven track record!
Hey, if anything good comes out of this, it’s that the WMA market will be splintered even further. Really, the only hope for iTunes’ competitors is for a large number of them to give up.
If Yahoo and a few other media players were smart, they’ll make their service available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Not all Apple users want iPods, believe it or not.
I wouldn’t switch, but for $5, I’d give Yahoo the old college try. That price point is almost irresistible, much like a 99 cent single.
I may sound like an iTMS heretic to you. But if the price is low enough and I have ready access to a wide range of quality music, then I might consider a subscription service.
I am currently loading all of the CDs that my wife and I have collected over the years into iTunes (as Apple Lossless), and so far four out of 53 CDs have oxidation damage. So I guess that I don’t really “own” that music since I will have to pay to get it back.
From a cost standpoint, 300 CDs at $12 each is $3600. A subscription service at $60 per year ($5 per month, assuming no increases) would take 60 years to equal that cost and would provide me with a much wider range of music. Heresy? No…practicality. The key to the decision is how good is the subscription service (user interface, portability, transparency of DRM, etc.).
Eventually the iTMS will offer a subscription service.
ive said it before, if apple wants to just outright kill everyone, they should offer a 5000 song subscription per month for 12 bucks. At the end of each month you can put that 12$ towards the purchase of 12 songs (or 10 or wahtever) that you actually own at that point.
So you would not only get to try 500 songs per month, but youd get to keep 12 of them. Listeners win as they get to try more music, and Apple/Music industry win because it guarantees them at least 12$ in revenue from everyone each month.
Five whole dollars for a huge amount of music ?
So how much of those five dollars will the artists and labels be getting ?
The publishers feel that iTMS doesn’t get them enough money, so how happy are they going to be with this arrangement ?