I (and many others) have been saying it for years, and it looks as though it might finally come true. Yahoo! and Microsoft are both toying with adding music and playlist functionality to their instant messenger products. AOL's IM machine includes a button which turns on an Internet radio stream—fairly non-interactive. Sharing live playlists in chat is technically doable. The problems are mainly political and legal: content owners do not want to see IM's many millions of users sharing music streams effortlessly. This type of interactive listening would not fall under the government-regulated (in the U.S.) royalty scheme that applies to commercial Webcasting. The difference is that Webcasting is one-to-many, whereas IM sharing is one-to-one… in theory. In fact, group listening via IM would be easy to accomplish, as demonstrated by Yahoo!'s group listening feature in its chat rooms, which are closely linked to its IM client. It's no wonder that AOL is taking a back seat in this race, closely affiliated as it is to Warner Music, a major record label. Yahoo! and Microsoft represent the technical vanguard which is constantly seeking for a new and better way to deliver music to consumers. IM is it.