Yahoo! and RealNetworks Inc. have signed a deal that will have older customers of the Sunnyvale-based company switch to the latter's Rhapsody music service. This comes on the heels of Yahoo! announcing that they would be discontinuing their online music subscription service.

A bold move as that might turn to be, it may have some impediments going through, due to the fact that Rhapsody has higher financial demands from its users. The subscription per month when signing on for a year is roughly double what Yahoo! was asking for, with $12.99 opposing the mere $5.99. While a subscription for a month would have users pay $8.99 with the service to be shut down. The migration will take effect sometime in the first half of the year, with a date not being disclosed.

Yahoo! is currently trying to work on its online music service and was in talks late last month with the big names in the music industry to try and start an ad-supported program that would translate into free (hopefully) downloads for its clients. "People want to have music and consume it in lots of different forms and across different devices and platforms and we want to have a play in as many of those as we can," Scott Moore, Yahoo's head of media, told the Associated Press.

The Internet giant carefully timed the discontinuing with the launch of its web-based player and with the acquisition of FoxyTunes. It's good to see that Yahoo! is going forward with its plan despite the possible takeover by Microsoft Corp.

"We already have a very significant streaming ad-supported business and that's something that I'm particularly interested in continuing to expand. […] In terms of downloads, that's another area where I'm not quite ready to talk about yet, but we're very interested and we're exploring our opportunities," Moore told the cited source.