RSSYahoo Music Service Challenges iTunes
By Nate Mook | Published May 10, 2005, 8:01 PM
Yahoo's online music strategy has finally taken shape after a year of development with the launch of the Yahoo! Music Engine, the company's challenger to iTunes and subscription services such as Napster. While it may be late to the party, Yahoo threatens to shake up the industry with prices 60 percent less than its rivals.
At the center of the Yahoo! Music Engine lies Yahoo! Music Unlimited, a music download service powered by MusicNet. For a fee of $4.99 USD per month paid annually, or $6.99 USD monthly, customers can stream or download an unlimited number of songs and transfer them to portable devices supporting Microsoft's Janus digital rights management technology.
By comparison, Napster and Real charge customers just under $15 for the same functionality. Yahoo is offering all of its tracks in 192Kbps Windows Media Audio format, from a growing catalog of over one million songs. The company says it is currently signing on more independent labels.
As with any such music service, songs will become unplayable if the subscription lapses. Alternatively, users can purchase individuals songs they wish to keep indefinitely for 79 cents, or 99 cents for customers who forego the monthly fee. Downloads can be played on a total of five PCs or transferred to WMA-compatible portable devices.
LAUNCHcast, Yahoo's online radio service, finds prominent placement in the company's new player as well. Yahoo! Music Unlimited Subscribers have full access to more than 150 pre-programmed, commercial-free channels.
Yahoo! Music Engine also brings to the table a full-featured music player, but goes beyond playlists and CD ripping with an open architecture tailored to third party developers. The idea, company officials say, is to build a library of plug-ins that offer a range of extended functionality, such as music slideshows and podcasts.
"As media players increasingly become a commodity, the services that are in them become more and more important. The challenge was to build not just a media player, but a container for media services with media player functionality," Ian C Rogers, Lead Engineer for Yahoo! Music Engine, told BetaNews. "Additionally, every component of our media player is built with our own plug-in API, so we know our framework works -- we use it!"
While it may lack actual file sharing, Yahoo has built in some peer-to-peer support. The player ships with a plug-in that integrates Yahoo! Messenger buddies, enabling users to share music with their friends or simply browse another's playlist to discover new music.
Community features are not limited to plug-ins, however. Yahoo! Music Unlimited attempts to differentiate itself from iTunes and other services by focusing on personalization. Users can setup profiles of their musical likes and dislikes, which are used by Yahoo to create custom home page of recommended artists and songs.
"Yahoo! Music Unlimited's personalization leverages 3 billion ratings already made by Y! Music users to provide smarter recommendations, providing personalized new releases, just added, and song and artist recommendations based on your ratings," explained Rogers. "Also, a SmartShuffle improves shuffle play by biasing based on ratings, variety and recency of listen."
Despite the overlap, Yahoo's recently acquired Musicmatch subscription services will remain operational for the time being; the company says it plans to eventually combine Musicmatch's offerings with Yahoo! Music Unlimited.
Yahoo! Music Engine is being rolled out in beta form, which will give Yahoo a chance to ensure scalability before beginning a media blitz across its Web properties. The application runs on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Yahoo! Music Unlimited will initially be available only in the United States, but international support is expected to follow.
I just tried out the new Yahoo service last night after being a member of Musicmatch for several months now. On the plus side I liked that I was able to find artists and tracks that weren't available on Musicmatch. However the downside was BIG. I don't know if it's the fact that Yahoo uses the Janus DRM from Microsoft, but before every track play I would have 15 to 30 seconds of dead air before the song would start. Talk about a party killer. It looked just like the Windows Media Player trying to buffer. Perhaps a little forwared thinking could buffer your whole playlist. Than at least you'd only have to put up with it once.
This is something that Yahoo will have to fix before I would consider switching, even with the 50% price difference appeal. Not like it matters since they own music match too.
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|I would like to know how the burning of the purchased tracks are done. Is the CD burned directly from the web site. Or the purchased track get downloaded to the hard drive and then burned. If this is the case,what will be format of the purchased tracks? In Rhapsody, the format of the purchased track is *.rax format which can be played only in Rhapsody or RealPlayer.
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|"192Kbps Windows Media Audio format" (WMA) www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia www.playsforsure.com
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|The Engine only works with Internet Explorer??
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|i'm not referring to the music store, but the application in particular. i understand ian's swipes at winamp, wmp, itunes, etc. as uninteresting music players, but IMO they all do the job of just playing music MUCH better than yahoo's offering.
in particular, processor usage spikes with yahoo while playing an ordinary vbr mp3, constantly jumping from 5-30% in a seesaw manner. that's just unacceptable to me. let's see how the next version fares.
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|22 cents a track on average, VBR mp3 format, and no BS whatsoever.
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|for those out there that can't read a simple article, here's a summary. this software allows you to purchase music (to burn) for 79 cents if you are a member ($7/mo or $60/yr). membership entitles you to stream and rent "unlimited" tracks. if you are not a member, the tracks are 99 cents to burn. my god, why is this so hard for people to understand?
i own 2 ipods (3rd gen and a shuffle), and i am not anti-apple. iTunes is not the be-all end-all store. in fact, i think the iTunes on windows is clunky (and even though i told it not to install quicktime, i was surprised to find quicktime was installed and selected as my default media player)
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|Would someone clarify for me the legality of allofmp3.com? I read people tout it as a viable service, but I thought it is illegal.
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|What I had heard, on CNN, is that if you don't keep up your subscription you can't play the music downloads anymore. iTunes is better in that way.
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|That's the way all subscription-based services are (that I know of), including the most popular, Napster. The other model, which iTunes uses, is pay-per-song. Of course, then, you can keep the music as long as you want. Yahoo's services includes both ways.
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|itunes is better in the way that you can buy a song for 99 cents each as opposed to renting unlimited songs for $5/mo? well, if 99 cents per song floats your boat, this new yahoo store does the same thing with no monthly. i dont see how that is better.
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|I would like to see a company (Yahoo!, Apple, Real) to create an linux version of there software. I don't like using Wine for these apps.
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|i need help i can't get it to work i get a pop up saying the ordinal 422 could not be located in the dynamic link library PX.dll. can any body help ?????? thanks y lonch this when don't work is know what i mean Help.....
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|I would suggest uninstalling and reinstalling. Sounds like something got corrupt.
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|i don't yhy i am geting this pop up saying ordinal 422 could not be located in the dynamic link library PX.dll i have in stalled it and unenstalleedd it sarry for my spilling buy and i don't know y i am the only one knowing about i try to click on it and i get ordinal 422 could not be located in the dynamic link library PX.dll is some one out there that know what i am saying i would like to try it but it won't work on my pc and i have the updates for my pc my pc workand run fine on othere stuff it just this new beta yahoo poeple worked on this i need your help !!!!!!!!!!!??????????? thanks
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|Hey Ian:
Since you work for Yahoo. How are they going to treat the Musicmatch On Demand Subscribers now that they have launched Yahoo Unlimited. I feel ripped off right now that I paid an annual fee for Musicmatch on Demand and now Yahoo launches something that can be transfered to my Portable Player.
I would think yahoo would allow On Demand customers to access the new Yahoo Unlimited. I paid $7.95 a month just to listen to mucis On Demand and Now someone can pay $4.99 a montha nd do the same thing and transfer the songs.
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|Hi all. Thought you might be interested in hearing some thoughts after building this product for a year. They're here:
http://blog.360.yahoo.co...g4eqinB8z.GGJ7TmAz?p=89
Thanks for reading.
ian
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|i just wanted to check out the player, but having to install the yahoo messenger and download/install 30mb when the download link on the page said 5 just turned me off. i hate having stuff pushed onto me.
*sticks to itunes*
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|Yahoo Messenger isn't required if you don't want to use that plug-in. The player itself is only 6MB - half the download of iTunes.
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|But iTunes came with my computer. Why would I change?
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|If iTunes came with your computer, you have a Mac. And this doesn't work on a Mac yet, so you don't need to change :)
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|Nate.. iTunes came with some select HP computers...
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|If it doesn't run on Mac OS, then it's hardly a challenger to iTunes, is it?
That would be like saying iChat is a challenger to MSN Messenger.
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|that seems to be a very descent price...
i hope it will start a price war an get it down dirt cheap ;-)
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|Apparently, though, even if you pay the 79 or 99 cents per song you still can't burn them to a cd. So you still don't completely own it.
Of course there are methods of converting those files to mp3...
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|Haven't heard yet about a way to copy those Janus files somewhere... How can you convert those files to be able to copy them?
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|"you still can't burn them to a cd."? It very clearly indicates that BURNABLE tracks are $.79 for subscibers, and $.99 for non-subscribers. Add the subscription element and you can listen to the entire song, not just a sample like at iTunes. With the subscription you can even put it on your Janus supported MP3 player and listen to it for as long as you want, before deciding to purchase and burn a disc.
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|" Haven't heard yet about a way to copy those Janus files somewhere... How can you convert those files to be able to copy them?"
I haven't seen anything on that in a while, at $5 a month after buying an annual subscription, why do you need to bother, you want to burn to a CD? At this point, I would never be caught using the antiquated CD format anymore. I don't even own blank CDs anymore. It is all about the MP3 player. And really, for $5 a month to legally listen to the same music I could listen to from an illegal P2P, I can avoid a letter from the RIAA.
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|Musicmatch?! this clunky dinasour of stupidity roars it's ugly head again. 25MB download. no. anyone in cahoots with this bloated crap can keep all there freekin MP3's for 79 cents all the way to 5cents... not gunna do it. allofmp3.com for me...(end rant)
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|i found this...
http://www.broadbandrepo...m/forum/remark,12103825
yahoo better drop musicmatch and get a diffrent player. I doubt this service will even fly.
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|This is a brand new service with a brand new player. It is still completely separate from MusicMatch's service and player.
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|randal2k, you may want to get out of 2k and join the rest of us here in 2k5, this article isn't about Musicmatch (which you seem consumed with). Do you want to talk about the cutting-edge 1 megapixel cameras coming out soon? How about the new 56.6 modems...
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|late night, not enough sleep?
anways.. sorry...
after looking at the new yahoo service i think that they are doing good to try to start a price war or to get buisness with slightly less exspensve songs. Yet, with lack of encoding choices.. allofmp3.com is still mt fave.
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|" late night, not enough sleep?
anways.. sorry...
after looking at the new yahoo service i think that they are doing good to try to start a price war or to get buisness with slightly less exspensve songs. Yet, with lack of encoding choices.. allofmp3.com is still mt fave."
What do you mean by "lack of encoding choices?" I just took a quick look at it and from what I can see, it supports AAC, Ogg, FLAC, MP3, WAV and more.
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|Just put the songs on your mp3 player and run a line from your from the headphones to the microphone in your computer and record in any format you want loose some quality but then you get the format of your choice and still have the music if you decide to cancel your subscription.
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|Well im sticking with LimeWire you people are crazy to shum out all this money and you can't even keep what you have what a waste no? I mean for the price you can buy double the blank cd's at like 15Cents a disc.
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|not to what it can play. But in choices of what you download. You cannot pay 99c to get a file encoded in OGG... thats waht i meant. allofmp3.com allows this. And i havn't read that it's illegal, so, they get my buisness.
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