A popular online music series on Yahoo!
Last year's season featured acts like Incubus, Maroon 5, and Christina Aguilera performing a handful of songs in an intimate 300-seat venue. Yahoo! then tried to pull as many of its other subsidiaries as possible into the promotional mix. From concert snapshots on Flickr to audience blogs at Yahoo! 360 to selling the tracks on Yahoo! Music itself, it seemed like an evolutionary, Web-friendly step after MTV's popular Unplugged concert series.
In that sense, it's fitting that the show will now make its way on to Viacom's
The deal should also be great for Yahoo! Music, a subsidiary that has often been portrayed as a laggard and has been rumored to be on the chopping block. The show and its A-list performers will help build the brand, something that Yahoo! sorely needs right now.
It's not easy to compete in the music space when you are typically associated with being a search engine or a place to sign up for a free e-mail account. Yahoo! doesn't have the music-branding panache of a Napster
The televised exposure, even if we're only talking about a 30-minute monthly snippet on a niche MTV cable channel, can only help. Maybe it's not too late to rewrite the famous "I Want My MTV" song with Sting and Dire Straits to go "money for nothing and your clicks for free."