LAUNCHcast

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A 1999 issue (#35) of the LAUNCH disk magazine, a precursor of LAUNCHcast.

For other uses of the word launch, see launch. This page is specifically for the Yahoo! Music service.

LAUNCHcast is an online music service 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. The website also features artist profiles with extensive selections of music videos, photographs and biographical information.

Free accounts are limited to playing 600 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.

Commonly referred to simply as "LAUNCH" (and rebranded "Yahoo! Music" or simply "Y! Music" in February 2005), it began as a magazine by the same title that was issued in both standard print format and as an interactive CD-ROM. Eventually the print version was eliminated and subscribers were only sent the CD-ROM version. It contained video interviews, live performances and special video segments by music stars as well as standard (but interactive) music magazine features. Eventually the company, Launch Media, started offering music videos over the Internet and started LAUNCHcast in 1999. LAUNCH was purchased by Yahoo! for US$12 million in 2001 and integrated into their website.

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.

On September 14, 2004, Yahoo! purchased Musicmatch, Inc., makers of the Musicmatch Jukebox software. As of Musicmatch 10.1, Yahoo! has rebranded Musicmatch Jukebox as Y! Music Musicmatch Jukebox, and integrated it with the Yahoo! Music Engine store. The main difference is the branding and physical program.

In 2005, Yahoo! Music became the first major online music service to provide a $5 per month unlimited download service similar to the Open Music Model, albeit with digital rights management, called Yahoo! Music Unlimited.