Yahoo! Tries To Drag Its Music Strategy Back Into The Portal age

As if there wasn’t enough excitement in the digital-music space about Monday’s launch of the probably dead on arrival groundbreaking fusion of social-networking and music that is MySpace Music, Yahoo! has announced a redesign of its Music section, since the whole paid downloads thing didn’t quite work out. What’s the brand-new Yahoo! Music going to do, you ask? Why, it’s going to suck up content from music-centric sites with open APIs, place that content into different panels, and then allow users to “arrange various panels on artists pages” for the purposes of, I don’t know, being obsessive-compulsive about whether or not they first see a Wikipedia entry or iTunes info on those days that they actually think to visit Yahoo! Music for their music-infotainment needs, instead of the handy search function built into their browsers. But hey, not only is this a great way for Yahoo! to save money on pesky “music-related content,” it gets Yahoo! back to its roots as a site that served as little more than a jumping-off point to other places on the Web.

“There’s lots of fragmentation in the digital music space right now,” said [Yahoo! Music head Michael] Spiegelman. “Whereas five years ago, it used to be the major portals — us, AOL, MSN, et cetera — now there’s lots of competing players out there: iTunes [and] Amazon for consumption; there’s YouTube, Pandora and Last.fm, and imeem, and iLike, and all these different services. And because of that, we obviously have a challenge, in that we want to stay really relevant to consumers.”

There’s an undercurrent of “if you can’t beat them, join them” to this strategy. But what’s wrong with that?

Consumers want what they want, and Yahoo hopes they’ll see the benefit of being able to access the stuff on all of these services from one configurable directory.

“For consumers, there’s a challenge. Because if you’re a leading-edge person, then you can go out and explore and find what services you like and hook onto whatever’s new,” Spiegelman explained. “But if you’re more mainstream, then you’re not spending a lot of your time doing that. So how do you find these services?”

While I don’t deny that this will provide something of a traffic boon for the lesser-known sites out there (hey Mike, give a ring if you want to design me a module, if you know what I’m saying), I have to ask if these “more mainstream” users will be wary of the customization and leave the default modules the way they are–at least until Yahoo! Music’s next rebranding, which, judging by the timeline its parent company seems to be operating on these days, will probably come sometime in late fall ’09.

Yahoo Music Hub Will Tailor Services to Users’ Tastes [Listening Post]