Webjay moves to Yahoo!, good news for Magnatune

Congrats to Lucas Gonze & Webjay for the announcement that Yahoo is buying Webjay and Lucas is moving over to their music group in California.

Magnatune was the first big advertiser on webjay, and for about a year, every page at webjay had this great ad that Lucas coded. The ad asked you to listen to a random magnatune song (each page refresh changed the recommendation) and if you liked it, one-click add it to your webjay playlist. That's not the usual banner ad, since it didn't take people away from webjay, and really all it was doing was asking people to listen to our music. It was definitely successful, as lots of people added Magnatune music to their webjay playlists and magnatune, to this day, gets plenty of hits from webjay listeners. As webjay grew in popularity, Lucas very nicely told me he could get advertisers who paid more for that slot, and I was happy for him!

I talk about webjay every opportunity I get, because I think grass-roots playlists, filtering and other community-based ways that music is discovered, are our most likely weapons-to-succeed against command-and-control big-money style marketing by the major labels. And Lucas runs one of the best of them. The fact that Yahoo is going to give this approach (shared community playlists) a try, means more visibility for Magnatune and other free-to-listen approaches to the music biz.

As Lucas writes on the "music lovers union": Take it this way, because you should: there is huge economic value to open media. It's fringe now, but it's going to be central, and there are going to be a lot more deals like this.

Very, very good news!