Via Slashdot:

Betanews has the story that Yahoo has launched their music service to compete with Napster & iTunes. Yahoo has quite an interesting strategy in the music business. With pricing 60% less than Napster & Rhapsody ($4.99 / mo with an annual fee), 79 cent downloads (99 cents if you’re not a monthly subscriber) (and at 192k WMA!), a media player that integrates with other Yahoo services with support for other formats, and support for Janus portable players just like Napster2Go.

The first user post on the Betanews story, is a link to one of the developers’ blog, who has a ton of information on the Yahoo service and player.

What’s interesting to me about Yahoo right now is their focus on their users. Including their acquisition of Flickr, the launch of Yahoo 360, and now music, they’re very focused on tying these services together, and user communication between members (look at your friends music list for suggestions, or Flickr tags and friends lists). While Google is focusing on web and desktop services applications, Yahoo is going in a different direction in creating communities, and tools for these communities to share and grow closer together.

Now if only their music engine / services worked on Linux…dammit, I’d buy music online if I could.