Yahoo Music has seen two of its top executives resign, as vice president and general manager David Goldberg and his long-time lieutenant Robert Roback turned in their papers in order to get back to their “entrepreneurial roots.”
Goldberg and Roback originally came to Yahoo in 2001 when the Internet portal acquired their company Launch Media.
In a statement released by Yahoo, Goldberg characterized the decision as personal: “After 13 years in this industry, Bob Roback and I look forward to going back to our entrepreneurial roots. I will help in the transition to new leadership, and I am proud to have led an exceptional team of music professionals. I wish them continued success.” Yahoo has tapped Vince Broady, Yahoo’s head of entertainment and games, to head up Yahoo Music.
Goldberg recently went on record at Silicon Valley Watcher as an advocate of doing away with digital right management technologies in music sales, noting that Yahoo’s tentative experiments in offering unprotected music in MP3 format had been successful. “There is already a lot of music available without DRM, and it just makes things complicated for the user,” said Goldberg, who also noted the Microsoft DRM used by Yahoo Music “doesn’t work half the time.” The sentiments echo those recently expressed by Apple’s Steve Jobs, in which he speculated the best solution to interoperability problems for music consumers would be for record labels to drop their DRM requirements.
