Yahoo! Music (Japan)

» see music.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Yahoo! Music in Japan started in July 2000 as an information site, which meant news and artist pages with a lyrics lookup attached, a place to read about music rather than hear it. The listening came later and in pieces. In August 2005 the portal added Sound Station, about a hundred thousand tracks streaming free and at full length rather than in thirty-second samples. In 2007 it added a download feed wired to iTunes, and a separate storefront sold tracks through mora. What had been a magazine ended up with a radio station bolted to one side and a record shop to the other.

Yahoo! JAPAN gave notice on 15 June 2012 and closed it on 27 August. The mora sales channel went on 12 August, fifteen days before the rest of it. What went with the site on the 27th was the part users had put there themselves. The listener reviews and the playlists were deleted on the closing day, ratings included. AV Watch counted it as a shutdown in the service's twelfth year.

The explanation Yahoo gave is more specific than companies usually manage, and it is a sentence about software rather than about money. Sound Station was a service premised on Internet Explorer and the PC, and there were parts of it that could not meet what people now needed from a phone. Having looked at the listening and watching experience and decided it wanted something easier to use, the company said, it ended up reconsidering Yahoo! Music along with it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ built for one browser ~

A streaming service written for Internet Explorer in 2005 is not a lazy service, it is a correctly specified one. Assuming IE on a desktop was the right call then, and not only in Japan. I was on Internet Explorer 6 through those same years in Turkey, because that was what the web had decided a person was, and anyone building audio playback for a browser in 2005 chose between a Windows media plugin and Flash.

Then it expired. Yahoo had already begun stripping features out of Sound Station before it announced the closure, which is the treatment anything gets once the ground under it has moved and nobody wants to rewrite it from the bottom. By June 2012 the company had stopped trying to carry it forward, and it said as much to the press rather than leaving anyone to guess.

~ the twelfth year ~

Asked what came next, Yahoo said it had entered consideration of a new music-related service. That is the last thing on the record. No replacement under the Yahoo! Music name ever opened, and the Japanese streaming market the site had spent twelve years sitting in front of went to companies that never had to care which browser you used.

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