Yahoo LAUNCHcast

» see launch.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i used yahoo for messenger and search in the early 2000s, not radio. radio was something you ran inside winamp with shoutcast streams from servers you found on icecast directories or from forum threads. yahoo radio felt like the kind of US licensing product that probably did not work cleanly outside the country, and that turned out to be the case: launchcast had geographic restrictions baked in for most of its catalog, since the webcaster rates yahoo paid covered US streams. you could load the page from turkey, you could not actually get most stations to play.

the service itself was technically interesting. todd beaupré and jeff boulter at LAUNCH media built a recommender in 1999 that watched what you rated up and what you rated down on a five-star scale, and then assembled an endless personalized station that drifted toward your taste. it was pandora before pandora. the company went public in spring 2000 right at the top of the dot-com bubble, then watched the stock collapse like everyone else. yahoo bought it in june 2001 for $12 million, which was a fire-sale price for a service that already had 7.4 million users. inside yahoo it became yahoo music, with launchcast as the radio engine.

then the 2007 copyright royalty board decision happened. the new per-stream rates would have eaten roughly 70 percent of webcaster revenue. yahoo, which was already losing the internet-music narrative to itunes and spotify-shaped startups, decided not to fight. in december 2008 yahoo struck a deal with CBS radio. CBS would run launchcast under its own ad sales, with traffic eventually being migrated to last.fm, which CBS had also acquired. the personalized stations yahoo users had spent years training got phased out. the launchcast plus subscription tier got killed. the brand finished evaporating over the following year.

~ the record ~

~ what it was ~

the rating loop was the whole product. you started a station around an artist or genre, the service played a song, you rated it 1 to 100 with sliders for the song and the artist and the album, and over a few hundred ratings the station became something close to your actual taste. the recommender used the aggregate ratings of users with similar profiles as a collaborative-filtering signal. before pandora's music genome project framed itself around hand-coded musical attributes, launchcast had quietly built the user-rating version of the same problem and shipped it to several million people.

~ the next chapter ~

last.fm got most of what was useful, since CBS owned both. pandora got most of what was popular in the US, since it was already growing fast in 2008. spotify, which arrived in the US in 2011, eventually swallowed the whole category. the launchcast model of the rating-driven personalized station survived inside last.fm's scrobble-based recommender for a few more years, then bled out as last.fm itself receded into discovery-tool status. nothing on streaming today asks you to rate songs on a five-star scale anymore. the recommender just watches your skips.

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