Launch Music

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Launchmusic
LAUNCHcast
Image:Launchcast_logo.jpg
Developer:Yahoo!
OS:Microsoft Windows
Use:Broadcasting - Internet Radio service
Website:LAUNCHcast

LAUNCHcast is an Internet radio service offered by Yahoo Music that plays music based on the user's ratings and preferences. With a Yahoo! user account, users can gain access to hundreds of thousands of songs sorted by artist, album, song and genre. The service uses a voting feature to build a playlist based on the user's favorite kinds of music as well as their favorite artists, albums, and even songs. The music is played much like an internet radio feed, except that the user influences the primary content of his/her own station through ratings, and the service provides additional material based on similarities to the user's chosen artists and styles. The user is not required to participate in the voting system, however, and many people seem to prefer listening without rating.

Users may share their stations publicly and may also listen to other users' stations, or to themed stations based on particular artists or genres through the Yahoo music website.

Free accounts are limited to playing 3000 songs per calendar month (this number is subject to change) without any special restrictions. A song may be skipped to bypass an undesired track, but skipped songs count against the monthly allowance. Between tracks, free accounts will hear commercial advertising for the Yahoo! service and its partners and affiliates.

If the free user exceeds the monthly limit, the user will experience several restrictions for the remainder of the month: song-skipping is not available, the audio quality is lowered, the stream is in mono, pre-programmed stations are not available, and the catalog will be curtailed for customized stations.

Users may subscribe to the LAUNCHcast Plus premium service on a monthly or an annual basis. LAUNCHcast Plus users receive the following additional benefits: no monthly limit on the number of tracks that may be played, unlimited song skipping, higher bit rate stream (for higher audio quality), no commercials, access to more pre-programmed stations than free users receive, the ability to designate other user's stations as "influencers" of one's own station, and the ability to create "moods". ("Moods" are genre-based subsets of the user's primary personal station.)

LAUNCHcast Plus is widely available in the United States and Canada, and also in the United Kingdom but restricted to BT Yahoo! Internet customers. "Regular" LAUNCHcast may be listened to from most areas of the world. LAUNCHcast content varies by country, due to music licensing restrictions.

Yahoo! LAUNCHcast requires Microsoft's Windows Media Player in order to function. At the present time, Yahoo! LAUNCHcast only works with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, Netscape 7.1 and in Yahoo!'s Messenger and Music Engine programs on the Microsoft Windows operating system. There is a petition to Yahoo! asking it to allow LAUNCHcast compatibility for other browsers such as Firefox and Opera, but Yahoo! hasn't shown any particular concern in porting to any of these browsers and systems, even though some listeners have directly asked Yahoo for this capability. Compatibility is claimed with Macintosh OS X, but there are known issues that have not been resolved.

In 2007 permanent banner ads were added to the player. There are now visual ads all the time on the player, instead of audio and visual every ten to fifteen minutes.

On April 27, 2007, Yahoo! defeated Sony BMG in a copyright infringement lawsuit involving LAUNCHcast's personalization features . After a six-year litigation, a jury decided that LAUNCHcast was not required to negotiate licenses as an "interactive" service, and that the service's compulsory licenses as a "non-interactive" service, which it obtained from SoundExchange, were sufficient.

Notes and references

  1. ^ Billboard.com Yahoo! Defeats Sony BMG Infringement Suit. Accessed May 2, 2007

See also

  • Yahoo! Music
  • Pandora
  • Mercora
  • Last.fm