Yahoo to open music site to other services

A screenshot of Yahoo Music, taken on September 11, 2008.

SUNNYVALE, California (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc plans to open its online music site to feature information about songs and artists from outside services such as Apple Inc iTunes or Amazon.com, an executive said on Thursday.

"We are going to completely open up Yahoo Music in the next few weeks," Scott Moore, the executive in charge of Yahoo's media businesses, told reporters at a briefing at the company's Sunnyvale, California, headquarters.

At the meeting, Yahoo executives discussed the range of ways that the company is seeking to open up the world's largest Internet destination to feature content from across the Web instead of just information located on Yahoo's own sites.

Moore showed prototypes of how Yahoo planned to open other media properties within Yahoo's network -- which overall attracts more than 500 million users worldwide each month.

Beyond music, the company is working to allow partners to deliver content on the main page of Yahoo News, the company's second most-visited Web page after its home page, he said.

Other Yahoo executives described progress the company is making in opening up its e-mail system, which counts upward of 275 million users worldwide and is the world's largest consumer e-mail service.

Ash Patel, the company's products chief, showed how Yahoo was incorporating applications from outside services such as video-rental company Netflix inside Yahoo Mail. Other executives highlighted recent announcements to feature Yahoo and other Web content on Yahoo services aimed at mobile phones and televisions.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard in Sunnyvale, editing by Maureen Bavdek)