The cutthroat online music biz |
Real shares dropped 21% and Napster dropped 26.8% on Wednesday after the release of the new Yahoo music service: 
Yahoo’s new service, unveiled Wednesday, is coming in at a bargain price. Subscribers can get unlimited access to a library of 1 million songs for as little as $4.99 per month, or about $60 annually. Subscribers who don’t want to make a one-year commitment can pay a rental fee of $6.99 per month.
A comparison chart between Y! Music Unlimited, Naspter and Rhapsody puts Y! on top with burnable downloads at 79 cents instead of .99 (Napster) and .89 (Rhapsody), 120+ preprogrammed stations and the ability to share music with friends using Yahoo! Messenger.
Recently I signed up my son for Napster, but unless I’m missing something significant here (help me out, readers), we’ll be switching. 60 bones a year sounds better to me than 120 to listen to mostly the same songs on competing services.
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I subscribe to Napster and Virgin Digital, and just played with Y! Music last night for several hours.
Aside from price, YME is better than Napster because:
- It learns what you like
- It has more diverse radio stations
- The player offers more features
- YME has useful and fun plugins!
Napster is better than YME because:
- Though counterintuitive due to file sizes, Napster songs *seem* to sound richer and brighter!
- Napster lists all songs by an artist in one easily sortable list. With YME, you have to click on each album.
- YME has crashed or frozen on me several times
- It integrates with Windows Media Player (where I’ve already made playlists, added ratings, etc.)
- It has Billboard charts
- It has message boards
- It doesn’t bring up IE for lots of pages
* * *
I’m still forking over $60 for YME, because I think it has a lot of potential, and I don’t know how long that low price will last. But I’ll be keeping my Napster and Virgin Digital subscriptions in the meantime.
Comment by Adam — May 12, 2005 @ 2:43 pm PST
Wow, thanks for the details, Adam
LMK if you blog about this (trackback it, please). I haven’t had time to take Y! for a spin but it sounds very promising. The fact that they will be providing API access is even more encouraging to me. I’ll find out what my son thinks about it later tonight or tomorrow.
Comment by TDavid — May 12, 2005 @ 3:49 pm PST
[…] ic — by TDavid @ 2:23 am
As if cutting off Napster and Rhapsody at the knees with an aggressive — and unable to sustain, according to those in the Apple office […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Yahoo axes auction listing fees — June 7, 2005 @ 2:25 am PST
[…] Yahoo is citing paying subscribers as a key revenue increase source and that’s no surprise considering how Y! Music came onto the scene and cut out the knees of their competition with their introductory price plan. […]
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