Yahoo Japan offers online streaming of entire songs for free BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT 22 Aug, 2005: Yahoo Japan Corporation has started an audio-streaming service which allows the customers to listen to selected songs in full before they make their purchase. The move by Yahoo, the country's most-visited web portal is directed to attract customers to its music sites.  Yahoo Japan has started the new service which offers 100,000 songs on Monday.  Yahoo would be the first company to allow customers to listen to certain songs for free before they decide to buy the music. Existing services only allow customers to listen to song samples of about 30 seconds, a Yahoo Japan spokesman said. Yahoo Japan is facing tough competition from its U.S based counterpart Apple Computer Inc, which has recently launched iTunes music store in Japan with a library of more than 1 million songs. Yahoo aims to lure customers to buy CDs from the portal or to download music for a fee once they have listened to their favourite songs.  A Yahoo spokesman said that the number of available songs would soon be increased.  With songs sales Yahoo expects to earn advertising revenues and commissions.  Customers can't save the music files onto their computers from the streaming service. BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT