Yahoo Music - More Social

Yahoo has unveiled its new, more social Yahoo Music. The new site opens Yahoo's doors to content from YouTube, Last.fm, Flickr, and Pandora, and features affiliate links to iTunes Store and Amazon downloads alongside its partnership with Real's rival Rhapsody service. The changes may make the property a more appealing resource, but they could also turn Yahoo Music into less of a destination and more of a forgettable middleman.

The new features are most visible on Yahoo Music's revamped artist pages, of which there are reportedly more than 500,000. 

Nevertheless, Yahoo Music is still becoming more of a launch pad for musical adventure, and, arguably, not a very good one. The site still features a streaming player for shuffling through the songs and videos that you collect online from Yahoo's library, but most of the new widgets simply open a window or tab that takes the user to a new destination.

The more social Yahoo Music completes a transition the company began in July 2008 with the controversial shutdown of its DRM music store. Tracks were originally set to become worthless investments when the store shut down, but Yahoo finally did the right thing and refunded its DRM captives. But instead of making good on plans to launch its own DRM-free store, Yahoo has removed itself from digital distribution and shifted into music community aggregation.

Once the tools become more refined, third-party developers get to rock out, and services like Last.fm and Pandora actually get a home on these pages, Yahoo may have a really great product on its hands.