In comparison to Napster and Rhapsody, and also (to a lesser extent) services like eMusic and iTunes, Yahoo!'s music service has its quirks, but is a strongest bang for the buck.
In terms of its offerings, Yahoo! Music Unlimited is identical to Rhapsody and Napster because each service gives you a number of ways to legally listen and/or download music. You can: (1) stream MP3 quality audio from thousands of online radio stations; (2) purchase individual tracks for a one time fee; (3) download unlimited amounts of protected files; (4) share recommendations and playlists with other users; and (5) burn compilations.
You can participate in one or all of these business models. I first tried Yahoo! Music Unlimited when it launched in May 2005.
I signed up for the 7-day trial but in the end opted for Napster s paid service because it had a larger portfolio of music. Currently, Napster has over 2+ million songs available while Yahoo! up until just a few days ago still had about 1 million songs available (see below).
Without any press whatsoever, Yahoo! now advertises that they have over 2 million songs as well. How can someone double their portfolio and not think it s worth mentioning?
So in terms of the amount of songs available, both are on par.
Music Unlimited over Napster and Rhapsody is because of the price There is a fantastic promotion for Yahoo for anybody with a MasterCard. If you spend $59.98 for one year of unlimited downloads (the regular one year subscription price), you get a second year for free.
That works out to only $2.50 per month for unlimited downloads. Compare this to Napster, which costs $9.
95 a month unlimited downloads or Rhapsody Unlimited for $9.99 a month, and Yahoo! Music Unlimited begins to look quite appealing.
00/month range is sufficiently appealing for many users who would otherwise illegally download via BitTorrent or other pre-legal Napster-like services. Rather than sifting through, often unorganized, torrent sites and risking spyware and viruses as well as confronting various filename and ID3 tag schemes, it seems that buying in is becoming a cheaper and more convenient solution than illegal downloading.
Subscription v. Single-Track Business Models
or can get me approximately 4 albums on iTunes, which I can only play on my iPod.
First, you can choose to just not buy music and perpetually subscribe to a service like Yahoo! s. On the other hand, you can purchase CDs and just rip them yourself, which takes more time and more money.
The benefit of ripping your own music is that you can always re-rip your own CD when a new format comes out and you can buy any music player you want; plus, you re not going to lose your collection later on. In contrast to both of these approaches, Apple attempts to straddle the middle, but its position is inherently unstable because it gives you the worst of both worlds: restrictions on file formats, hardware and software lock in, and higher prices.
offers a subscription model, so you have to remain a member to keep your music. You can listen to however many songs, radio, playlists, download them to your computer when you re off the internet, and (for an additional fee) fill up your non-iPod music player with all the latest music. The fact that you lose all of this music if you stop becoming a member turns off a lot of people.
I can t say that it irks me as much as the iTunes and (maybe?) the Zune points model.
, Rhapsody, and Napster a big leg up over iTunes, which sell tracks one-by-one. If I spent $2.50 a month on iTunes, I d get two and a half tracks.
Sure I can put them on my iPod, which although I was unhappy with the first three generations of, has begun to live up to the hype with the Nano, but I m locked not only into Apple s proprietary file format, but also to their software (iTunes) and their hardware (iPod). Good luck if Apple wants to give you support in moving your songs to multiple computers, other iPods, or even another platform. From what I can tell, there are also some limitations on how many times you can burn the song.
Good luck using anything other than iTunes with it.
Even with a fast notebook or desktop, downloading tracks and navigating through them is resource intensive, especially if you have or are going to have a large music collection. What is nice is that Yahoo! s servers are quite robust, so if you have a fast internet connection, you can fly through a few hundred albums in a matter of hours.
You have full control over where the files are downloaded to. This is great if you have an extra hard drive and want to avoid making your MyDocuments\MyMusic folder bloated. Yahoo!
does, however, ask you to import your existing music into the jukebox so that you can listen to it in there. While this might be convenient, Yahoo! s jukebox is slow and it generally sucks.
I d say iTunes which I don t think is very good is much better than Yahoo! s jukebox in this respect. What is nice, however, is that you can open these protected .
wma files in Winamp, MediaMonkey, or Windows Media Player, which are all good alternatives to the crappy jukebox software. Yahoo! s interface needs a lot of work.
There is no quick way (or a very counterintuitive, often hidden way) of finding: (1) new releases; (2) a hierarchical list of genres. Both of these make the program difficult to navigate. It seems like Yahoo!
has six or seven different ways of finding music such as through other members, through similar artists/songs, and the like but Yahoo! does a very poor job of integrating these methods in its interface. A huge problem with Yahoo!
s interface is that it does not give you the track numbers of the tracks available for download. Thus, you can be downloading what you believe is a full album, but you ll eventually find out that it is missing tracks 7, 10, and 13. I know Yahoo!
avoids posting track numbers because it brings attention to the fact that many tracks are not available for download, but significantly impairing your customers abilities to navigate music is not a reasonable tradeoff. 
One of the best features of the program is that if you find a song you really like, you create a playlist of similar songs or similar artists. This is a fantastic way to just listen to great new music without having to sift through 2 million songs. I ve found plenty of great artists through this service.
Add into the mix the different permutations of album names and track names, and building a library of music can quickly become a disaster.
It, however, does not give you an option to correct the mistakes that Yahoo! has made. Thus, if you have an artist that is misspelled, you can t rename it.
I find the worst problems on rap and R B albums, which inevitably feature thirty different artists on each track. The names are all completely out of whack and there s no way to update them to make it easy to view.
Conclusion
50/month, you can get unlimited access to over 2 million songs. While the software has its quirks, is slow and often hard to navigate, the business model--and the access it gives you to new music--runs circles around Apple's digital marketplace.
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