Yahoo dumps Sony for iTunes

[DavyBUK]

Japanese Music site switches to Apple store

Martyn Williams

Yahoo Japan has replaced a Sony-affiliated music download service with Apple iTunes Music Store as the default music store on Yahoo Music Japan.

The partnership means that visitors to the Yahoo Music pages now see a prominent link to iTunes in the menu bar and one-click access to the download service. Until today, Yahoo Japan had relied solely on Mora, a download service run by the Sony-affiliated LabelGate, for music downloads.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Access to Mora is still available through Yahoo Japan although users must log in to the site and make it their preferred music store. The iTunes link appears by default.

The change is likely to be good news for Apple as Yahoo Japan is far and away the most popular portal site in the country. It reaches around 40 million people, or 84 percent of the country's internet users accessing the web from home each month, according to NetRatings Japan.

The collaboration between Yahoo and Apple might come as a surprise to some as the two companies battle each other in the US market. But the Japanese deal doesn't necessarily foretell similar alliances in other markets.

Yahoo Japan is a listed company with Softbank its largest shareholder. Softbank helped provide early venture financing for Yahoo in the US.

Yahoo follows as the number two shareholder with a roughly one-third stake. The result is that Yahoo Japan's business is fairly independent of the US.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=9716

[Rubber Duck]

Now that is big news. As stated on another thread iTunes is going to be used to Vector Safari Windows which now seems to the a cornerstone of Apples Strategy to nudge Microsoft off the nest. Yahoo Japan and Apple will make a powerful alliance

As I have said before, if Microsoft don't get their sad excuse for a browser to market soon, they are toast!

[rhys]

wa ha ha ha

[Drewbert]

Empires don't last forever, Rhys.

[Rubber Duck]

Well, General Gates ain't going to win this battle unless he commits some troops to the front line.

At the moment IE7 is looking rather like the Tirpitz, and we all know how that story ended.

[rhys]

Originally Posted by Drewbert

Empires don't last forever, Rhys.

I agree. Google may well be the next evil empire and unseat MS, but I chuckle at the notion that Apple ever will. I love Apple though, in my anakin days, I used a mac too. And though I go to lengths to disguise it, I have an ipod. i will probably buy the iphone when it comes out. But to me their principal power is in being an alternative. Not in being the juggernaut. It's their strength and their curse.

[Rubber Duck]

I think you may be correct t to some degree. I don't think Apple is about to establish a Monopoly position, but I do think they are about to break of their tiny niche, which frankly has been so small it is a wonder they survived at all. Some of remember when they were the dominant player.

I think it is going to be a brave new world out there, with various things happening, but with a software supporting multiple platforms. I think you will have a number of different formats. I think you will have true Macs, Hybrids, PCs with Risc processors, conventional PCs and a variety of operating systems including Vista, but not dominated by Vista. Frankly, we don't need to swap one evil empire for another. I think the Chinese will definitely bring out their own operating system and I think there is going to be a lot of open source out there. I believe a lot of smaller businesses and Government bodies will drift away from Microsoft, who will also lose a substantial tranche of the home market. There is likely to be a lot more open source software.