Yahoo has been saying for some time that it was planning to euthanize its music subscription service, but it wasn’t clear what it would replace the service with. Now it has become clear: Yahoo has sold the operation to Real Networks and will be migrating users to the Rhapsody service — although they will apparently get a couple of months worth of the lower Yahoo price before they have to cough up the $12.99 a month for Rhapsody. I’m sure that will make them all feel much better. Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music has more on the move here.

Although Rhapsody has a free, ad-supported version of its subscription service, the main offering is a paid streaming model, and both the free and paid services are of course all wrapped up in some tasty DRM. But the biggest problem with Rhapsody — and with Yahoo Music — is simple: Most people don’t want to stream their music like a radio station. They want to download it and do whatever they want to with it. Period.

That’s why Yahoo is dumping its subscription service in the first place, because it wasn’t working (Yahoo is doing some other interesting things with music, which I wrote about here). And Rhapsody only has about 1.5 million users of its music service after four years of operation, which isn’t much to write home about. Of course, the Yahoo Music switcheroo is in question — along with virtually every other aspect of Yahoo’s business — because of that takeover offer from Microbeast.