Yahoo has entered the music scene, and it is looking better than other music download services to date: better than Napster, Rhapsody, and dare I say iTunes. Yahoo! Music Unlimited is debuting at $4.99 per month when you sign up for a year. Like the name would indicate, you rent unlimited music and enough features to keep you satisfied.
Think about it: lay down the subscription fee for a year, and you can listen to all the new and old music you can handle for the price of 4 standard CDs ($59.88). For anyone who buys a few CDs a year, Yahoo! is a considerable alternative. It gives you all that you can possibly handle instead of limited tracks.
Since Yahoo is giving users such a huge collection of music, it really seems targeted for teenagers and other people who like lots of music but don’t own much (or have the means to own it). Also, buying CDs can be too costly to be worthwhile for those who find themselves selling CDs they lost interest in. Yahoo can be a complete alternative way to listen, or just a way for music fans to dabble in different music, even if its service won’t attract the die-hard CD and vinyl fans.
Yahoo boasts having over 1 million songs. Of course, that wouldn't mean much if they had hunderds of thousands bad songs. To subdue your doubts, you can check out what artists and albums they have before you sign up. Just visit the website at http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited. They really do have a great selection. They have brand new releases already, like Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth that just came out over a week ago (a great advantage over record clubs). Their front page has ads for new CDs that are yet to come out which they’ll have in stock once released. They also have plenty of older CDs. I tested out their search bar a number of times, figuring I could find a band they didn’t have in their collection. I found their selection was way more expansive than I would have ever expected.
And if you run out of artists and songs you want to hear, that’s only the start of your fun on Yahoo. It’s time to start exploring the vast collection of music that is essentially yours and finding new music. You could naturally just start clicking and listening at random, but Yahoo has a feature to help you out. It will recommend new music to you based on your listening preferences, kind of like Amazon.com or the helpful guy at your favorite CD store. If you’re still a CD fan and like owning things, Yahoo’s service could still be a cheap means to help you find new artists or try out new CDs before you buy them.
Provided you have the right mp3 player, you can take your songs with you anywhere. Your new music can go to the gym with you, or you can rock out at work. Like other music services, this one also gives the option of buying burnable downloads so you can use them in CD players. To burn a track, it will cost 79 cents, compared to 99 cents at Napster and iTunes and 89 cents at Rhapsody. So that makes burning a standard 12 track CD cost under $10. But why burn CDs when you can buy a portable player with a lot of space?
Another great feature is Yahoo’s commercial-free radio stations. They have 120 pre-programmed, and you can make your own. If you just want to share one track and not a whole station, you can send it to your buddies on Yahoo Messanger, provided they're subscribers too. Then to get an idea of what other people are listening to, you can browse their music collections.
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