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Yahoo! Music reportedly "dismantled" by recent lay-offs

Submitted by Paul Maloney on April 9, 2012 - 12:59pm

Monday, April 9, 2012 - 11:40am

You've likely heard that Yahoo! recently laid off 2,000 of its employees. Digital Music News reports that inside sources say Yahoo! Music took a pretty significant share of the blow.

Among the reported casualties: Head of Programming & Artist/Label Relations John Lenac (as well as at least some of his staff) and Director of Programming Gina Juliano.

(Yahoo! Music has) "been getting ripped apart," one source inside Yahoo! reportedly told the news source.

Though there's still significant traffic to Yahoo! Music (DMN cites comScore giving it 6 million monthly uniques among 18-34s), Digital Music News faults its generalist, media-portal approach for its failure.

Yahoo! Music alumi include Ian Rogers (now at TopSpin Media), Jay Frank (author and DigSin owner), and David Goldberg (Benchmark Capital, now at SurveyMonkey), and Jeff Bronikowski (AOL Music, then The Echo Nest). Yahoo! Music's online-only radio streams (formerly Goldberg's company's, LaunchCast) were taken over by CBS Radio in 2008 (see RAIN here). Broadcast.com founder Mark Cuban sold his aggregation of broadcast radio streams to Yahoo! in 1999 for a reported $5.7 billion. Cuban revealed to RAIN (here) that in the early days of webcasting, Yahoo! voluntarily entered into a royalty deal with the RIAA based on a high, flat rate -- as opposed to a percentage of revenue. This single deal was later used by the Copyright Arbitraton Royalty Board as the free-market basis upon which it determined statutory royalty rates that would almost certainly have quashed the young industry (had relief measures not later been passed).

Read more in Digital Music News here.

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