Thursday, January 03, 2008

Rhapsody Kills YottaMusic

Rhapsody apparently sent cease-and-desist letters to a number of 3rd parties that were using their "non-public" APIs to build value-added services on top of their content and data.

The first company that I've noticed be affected is YottaMusic.



I'm not sure what the difference is between the public and non-public APIs (or how YottaMusic got access to the non-public ones in the first place). But, it's unfortunate, I thought highly of YottaMusic and I think Rhapsody could have learned a thing or two from them. In fact, they should have bought them and leveraged their talent to finally RE-introduce some better community features into the Rhapsody service.

Rhapsody had, in fact, introduced some new community features (music profiles) last year but then rolled them back - rumor is that they way the feature was architected was not able to scale and was straining the whole service. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but I would love to see them make a reappearance. It's been over 6 months since they were yanked. Anyone from Rhapsody want to provide a more detailed update than this one?



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