Yahoo expands its music service

Yahoo's subscription-based music service is now widely available to consumers after a three-month trial run.

Yahoo Music Unlimited is designed to let people play songs, transfer tunes to portable devices or share with other subscribers via instant messaging, the company said Thursday. A beta version of the service was unveiled in May.

The service is priced at $4.99 per month for an annual subscription or $6.99 per month for a monthly subscription. It can be accessed by downloading from Yahoo software for importing and managing music and mixing and burning compact discs. The service is available in the U.S. only.

The low price tag for unlimited downloads is a wild card in the digital music market, so far dominated by Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store and iPod device. Amazon.com, meanwhile, appears to be preparing for an entry into the market, which also includes digital music companies such as Napster and RealNetworks. Software giant Microsoft also has a subscription service in the works.

A marketing campaign for the Yahoo music service is set to debut in conjunction with the MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 28 and will run until December.

[David Dudley]

Too bad it's so buggy

I've been using it since day one and it has a ton of issues.

1. Upgrade loop. You are constantly forced to upgrade to the same version over and over due to an outstanding bug.
2. Transferring songs fails. Often times, transfers of files fails and the user is not informed till 20 minutes later after the transfer is supposed to be complete. This is particularly inexcusable since something like iTunes *never* has this issue.
3. Cumbersome interface. Napster has a big one up on Yahoo Music Engine because the user can actually put songs in a playlist easily. With Yahoo, adding songs to a playlist seems to be impossible.
4. Reliance on IE as the rendering engine makes this software *very* slow. Clicking around from page to page in Yahoo Music Engine is particularly time consuming so much so, that I doubt any user on a slower net connection would be able to tolerate it.
5. Endless licensing issues. While the latest release version finally has a quick way to "relicense" songs via a contextual menu, this operation rarely works. This forces the user to delete their song and redownload them. In the worst case scenario, they have to tweak WindowsXP settings to find their hidden DRM folder and rename or delete it. Not an elegant solution by any means and not one that the average user should have to perform.
6. Skins are very unstable. The newer versions of Yahoo Music Engine ships with the ability to change the huge interface into a smaller player, somewhat akin to Winamp skins, but locked into what the developers (or maybe the marketing folk) want you to use. Unfortunately, these mini player modes often crash the player, forcing the user to launch Task Manager and kill Yahoo Music Engine.
7. Slow support response. While Yahoo Music Engine has technically adept responses, getting them is generally painfully slow. Expect a 1 to 2 day delay at least before getting any kind of response. Furthermore, they don't seem to have any kind of community based forum for people to share insight or to assist eachother with any issues they experience with Yahoo Music Engine.
8. Music comes and goes. This means that one day a song will be available for a user to download, and then the next day it disappears. This lack of consistency means that when you find a song that you like, download it and add it to My Music as fast as you can, for the next day, it may have disappeared.

For it's fair of weaknesses, Yahoo Music Engine does a couple very cool things.
1. Support of lots of different codecs. It lets rip and play OggVorbis, Flac and it does it well. It is one of the reasons I stopped using CDEx (shudder the thought!).
2. That's about it.

I still like it better than Napster, though, but still think that iTunes is about 100000% times better than Yahoo Music Engine, Napster, Rhapsody, MSN Music Store, Sony's invisible music store, etc, combined. iTunes works, has a great musical selection, great support, good prices and it syncs without worries, which is *exactly* what the average consumer is looking for. Furthermore, there is not one good SyncForSure WMA DRM playing device on the market that is worth the time even looking at, no less buying. Creative, Samsung, Rio, iRiver and about 100 other competitors try their damndest to make something compelling, but fall short everytime. Dell should not have used Creative to OEM their underselling MP3 players - they should have woken up and tried to negotiate with Apple. Maybe then their last quarter might have been a tad bit better.

Save your time, frustration and money: buy an iPod and buy music from iTunes.

Release YME worse than the beta

Thanks for posting that info about the DRM folder. That's exactly what happened to me, although the Yahoo people were absolutely useless in figuring it out. Their answer to everything is "delete your cookies."

Your comments about YME are dead on. I'm using the release build and it's buggier than the beta. The product is plagued with "scripting" errors that either make it impossible to use or severely limit it. These errors come and go almost at random - many people seem to experience them.

On the other hand, when Yahoo music works, it's terrific. To my ears, the 192K rips sound better than iTunes 128k. I love the subscription model and - provided they can get the DRM stuff working reliably - can't see any reason why I'd want to own music again. My shelves are filled with music (CDs) I own and don't listen to anymore. Short attention span, I guess.

Still, Yahoo has a long, long way to go before this service is ready for an average consumer.

[dhz157]

DRM is the K-E-Y

This article piqued my interest but was sadly lacking the details I
was hungering for, particularly, how are the digital rights
management going to work? Do you get to keep the songs, or is
it a case of "this tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds"?... Kudos to
the post by Mr. Dudley for the in-depth details that I, as a
News.com reader, need.

[David Dudley]

It's a rental shop

Yahoo Music, just like Napster and the rest of the music WMA-DRM stores out there have you *rent* the music. If at any point you stop paying their monthly fees, you can no longer play your music. The positive aspect is that you can listen to a bunch of songs from their massive library, the bad is that once you stop paying for it, you have nothing to show for it except for the memories. I personally like owning my music, so I buy cd's or only buy from iTunes Music Store (like 83% of digital music market does). These music rental stores are simply about trade offs: you lose some freedoms and gain some other freedoms, albeit temporary ones.

- You are not allowed to let friends borrow the songs unless you are willing to share your login and password with them and don't mind deauthorizing computers (see below for more on that).
- You cannot burn the songs to an audio CD (that will cost you anywhere from 79cents to 99cents per song).
- You cannot convert the songs into any other format (MP3, the no marketshare MP3Pro, OggVorbis, AAC, WAV, AIFF, FLAC - whatever). BUT! There is a workaround, but it involves using either a third party app to record the music as it plays to your harddrive (not Output stacker on Winamp, either) or recording from your audio port to another computer.
- The songs are locked down to a total of 3 authorized computers. If you want to listen to a song on a 4th computer, then you need to deauthorize that computer.

I forgot to add one more cool thing that Yahoo Music Engine does in my pseudo review. When you download songs on your first computer, it automagically syncs those songs onto your second computer next time you fire up Yahoo Music Engine. This is good and bad: good because it's good to have a library replicated on both your laptop and desktop if that is what you are looking for. Bad because if it has been a long time since you fired up Yahoo Music Engine on your second computer and you have downloaded a lot of songs, then you will have to wait quite some time. Still, it's a nice touch that iTunes does not offer (you can only download the song once with iTunes, probably due to financial constraints, so make sure to back up your AAC files!) and a feature that Napster would do well to be inspired by. ;-)

[jojowhowho]

buggy and without customer service

Bad enough that the service has problems, from the application itself to constant stream interruptions. But just try and get some help. Unlike other services (Real), there is not a number to call to get help right away. The email customer support option can take a week or more before a response is given, and then it can be something like, "what version of windows are you using?" or "Does this happen all the time?" Then you wait another week for a reply. Ad Nauseam.
On the upside, the personalization of radio stations is pretty cool.
It is priced right. And you get what you pay for, overall.

[Advertolog]

Yahoo music

download acid jazz music mp3
download acid music mp3
download acoustic music mp3
download alt. rock music mp3
download alternative music mp3
download ambient music mp3
download anime music mp3
download avantgarde music mp3
download bass music mp3
download beat music mp3
download blues music mp3
download britpop music mp3
download celtic music mp3
download chanson music mp3
download classical music mp3
download club house music mp3
download club music mp3
download country music mp3
download crossover music mp3
download dance hall music mp3
download dance music mp3
download darkwave music mp3
download disco music mp3
download drum solo music mp3
download easy listening music mp3
download electronic music mp3
download ethnic music mp3
download euro house music mp3
download euro techno music mp3
download eurodance music mp3
download folk music mp3
download folk rock music mp3
download folklore music mp3
download funk music mp3
download fusion music mp3
download game music mp3
download goa music mp3
download gospel music mp3
download gothic music mp3
download gothic rock music mp3
download hardcore music mp3
download hip hop music mp3
download house music mp3
download indie music mp3
download industrial music mp3
download instrumental music mp3
download instrumental rock music mp3
download jazz funk music mp3
download jazz music mp3
download jpop music mp3
download jungle music mp3
download latin music mp3
download lo fi music mp3
download meditative music mp3
download new age music mp3
download new wave music mp3
download noise music mp3
download oldies music mp3
download pop music mp3
download punk rock music mp3
download r&b music mp3
download rap music mp3
download rave music mp3
download reggae music mp3
download retro music mp3
download rock music mp3
download salsa music mp3
download samba music mp3
download soul music mp3
download soundtrack music mp3
download synthpop music mp3
download techno industrial music mp3
download techno music mp3
download trance music mp3
download tribal music mp3
download trip hop music mp3
download unknown music mp3
download vocal music mp3