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]

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