The company said its Music Unlimited service offers unlimited access to a catalog of over one million songs, which can be transferred to portable music players and shared through Yahoo! Messenger. It will also enable subscribers to build personalized music libraries and listen to commercial-free internet radio stations.

The portable service is being made available to US subscribers for an introductory price of $6.99 a month or $59.88 a year, offering a significant cost advantage over rivals Napster and RealNetworks who are thought to be charging $15 a month for their respective plans.

Apple's iTunes store, which is thought to be currently dominating the market with 70% of the US business, sells downloads for 99 cents, while Yahoo! said it will enable consumers to buy music tracks outright for the same price or 79 cents for subscribers.

The race to topple Apple is heating up at the moment, with reports claiming that RealNetworks has developed a free version of its Rhapsody service which offers internet radio and other features, in the hope of enticing new users. However, the company is said to be unwilling to match Yahoo!'s prices.

Yahoo!'s entrance onto the digital music scene has led some observers to note that the firm is apparently focused on expanding its Music unit. The company bought San Diego-based Musicmatch in September, which offers the Jukebox 10 music management system, online radio stations and a song download service. Yahoo! is also said to be in the process of launching an internet search engine for downloadable songs and music data following on from its release of its video search platform.

Source

---

When you sign up for Yahoo! Music Unlimited, you'll download the free Yahoo! Music Engine. It's said by Yahoo to be a smarter way to play, manage, discover, rip, burn and create playlists. Yahoo! Music Unlimited songs can
be transferred to Plays-for-Sure subscription-compatible devices including Zen, Rio, Sony, Phillips,
Dell and others as long as the subscription is valid. (If you're an iPod user with a Windows-based PC, you can transfer music you already own to an Apple iPod using the Yahoo! Music Engine. Unfortunately, iPods are not currently compatible with the Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription service.)

Source

---

Folks, other than a slight drop in the price of renting tunes (yes, these are still RENTALS ...or as many of us like to call them: "downloans") there is still yet no great improvement over anything else the music industry has in place already. DRM still infects everything offered. You would be better off buying the CD! ...that is, if the RIAA labels even MAKE real CD's anymore. (Remember, a CD with DRM is NOT a real CD according to red-book standards.)

But why are the major media outlets shouting praises from the rooftops about Yahoo! Music Unlimited and claiming that this is such a great thing? It appears to my eyes to be nothing more than yet another attempt by the media/industry to mind-fu*k the consumer into thinking they are finally getting what they want.

Seems to be Standard Operating Proceedure!

The Boycott Continues!

Shmoo, aka "independentmusician" of the band Electric Gypsy, your faithful Boycott-Riaa admin/mod

Support Local and Independent Music!

I KNEW this Yahoo-thing sounded too good to be true! I just did some more research on the details and this thing REALLY IS a bunch of bull:

Pay $60 a year for music you can't do a damn thing with. If you want to burn a cd, you must spend an extra $.79 per song? Hogwash.

Folks, don't get me wrong. I think Yahoo is a wonderful portal. I have happily used it myself for years. I am sure that if copyright laws as abused by the RIAA were not so insane, Yahoo (and others) would have offered much more consumer friendly services/applications a long long time ago!

The RIAA and their kissing cousins, the MPAA (and constituents) are to blame for all our woes!

I can see one group of folks who could benefit by subscribing to this service: those who have a lot of free time and want to sample as much music as possible.

True, you don't get to keep what you download long term. But I could see a case where someone with a lot of free time might want to pay $60 for one year just so they could easily download tons of music, listen to it, and make a list of tunes that they really want to keep. Then, they can acquire their favorites either by paying the 79 cents (most convenient way) or by downloading it from P2P / bit-torrent or purhasing the CD. In other works, this kind of service could be a good screening tool for music.

I gove these services this test:

Do the usual people get paid? (this answer is invariably yes)

if yes, I don't use the service.

I will not buy non-indie music full stop no matter how good it may seem.