Yahoo! vs. Rhapsody & Napster
Readers of this blog know that I love Rhapsody.
I honestly have never tried the new Napster.
Both of these services let you listen a huge music library over the Internet on demand.
You want to listen to a song or a record, you just type it in, and the music just starts playing.
Both services also allow you to burn music to a CD for just under $1/song.
And recently, they've both added "to go" services that let you synch whatever songs and playlists you like to your portable music device.
The two big problems with these services is that they don't work on the Mac and they don't work with iPods. That's not their fault (at least the iPod part). Steve Jobs wants you to use iTunes if you have an iPod and to date, he hasn't seen the need to offer unlimited listening.
The other really big deal with these services is the ability to share playlists. I am posting Rhapsody playlists to my blog and emailing them with my brother. If you have Rhapsody, all you do is click on the link and you can listen to the playlist. That's the way music sharing should work.
The problem is that there just aren't that many Rhapsody or Napster users. It's not a mainstream thing yet.
Enter Yahoo!. Yesterday they launched Y! Music Unlimited.
Here is the comparison of the three services, according to Yahoo!
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At first glance, Y! Music Unlimited looks to be a fantastic deal. I am going to download this service and give it a try.
Possibly the biggest thing about Yahoo!'s entrance is that they've integrated this service with a new music search engine that not only searches their music service, but also the rest of the music on the Internet. Vertical search for music. Cool.
But Yahoo! hasn't addressed the two big issues I outlined. There is no Mac client and there's no iPod compatibility.
Probably the best thing that can come of Yahoo!'s entrance into this market is lowering the price for Rhapsody and Napster, which certainly should happen, and hopefully pressure for Apple to offer unlimited listening and a "to go" service, which may not happen because it may negatively impact Apple's iTunes margins.
Regardless of what Apple does, here is the thing I want Yahoo!, Real, and Napster to do. Make your shared playlist links compatible with each other. Create a standard for sharing music legally on the Internet. That's what this market needs most of all.
Here are some del.icio.us links to the Y! Music Unlimited story.
UPDATE: Here is the blog post from the guy who built the Y! Music Unlimited service. I found this link via del.icio.us.
How is this a good deal?
You pay monthly for music that you don't own, and that can't be played on the most ubiquituous player around so your only option, to carry the music around with you, is to purchase a "burnable" download, which will cost you another 79 cents per song on top of the monthly (or annual) fee you are paying.
Doesn't sound so great to me. I'd rather pay 99 cents to get the song I want, put it on my ipod and be done with it.
Posted by: paul | May 11, 2005 at 09:48 AM
Interesting, but how big is their song list?
Posted by: Sean O'Rourke | May 11, 2005 at 10:19 AM
Well, I love the sound of Rhapsody - but they won't even let me sign up for it because I'm in some other country.
Posted by: Ivan Pope | May 11, 2005 at 01:01 PM
The part about only Yahoo having personalized recommendations is garbage; Rhapsody rolled out a new feature called "My Rhapsody" in the new version. The feature provides "Instant Playlist" and "Albums for You" recommendations based on the last 100 songs you streamed. The chart was obviously done a while ago -- probably from when the product was *supposed* to debut -- in MARCH. ;)
Posted by: matt | May 11, 2005 at 01:27 PM
I do think Yahoo! could have done a better job explaining how their service compares and competes with their own existing offerings like Launchplus...
also the branding is confusing as well...
ah, well, chalk it up to early days...
Posted by: Michael Parekh | May 11, 2005 at 01:45 PM
I wouldn't rely on Apple opening up the iTMS iPod network to competing services anytime soon. As long as their marketshare stays up there, Jobs will go for the monopoly, he alwasy does...
Posted by: Alex Rowland | May 11, 2005 at 02:28 PM
Last night while checking out the new jukebox features at Fubar, I happened to throw back a few beers - ah, whatever.
Anyway, even though they had a digital jukebox, I was surprised to find 50's new album. Still, I did want to hear Candy Shop or Just a Lil Bit.
The solution? Punch the "Find More Music from this Artist" button, double up the credit, and streat G Unit's remix masterfully.
The consumer market is sizeable, but as long as ARES, eDonkey, Shareaza and other "free" services exist, limited. What about the commercial side of the fence? Any other applications here?
Posted by: Matt | May 11, 2005 at 08:20 PM
From "the blog post from the guy who built the Y! Music Unlimited service":
Support for the open XSPF playlist format. We're trying to push forward an OPEN standard for playlisting, because it's ridiculous that it's 2005 and we're lacking even the basic currency for media exchange due to more than a decade of short-sighted proprietary verticals by media and software companies. This is just the start of Yahoo!'s participation in the definition of open standards to finally push the digital media industry FORWARD. *inhale*
Posted by: dano | May 12, 2005 at 09:25 PM
I tried Yahoo this past week and while the price is great, the software is pretty bad compared to Rhapsody or Napster. It'll improve over time, I'm sure.
Posted by: Apartment 604 | May 15, 2005 at 03:46 PM
This looks pretty cool and after reading some of the other posts associated with it I'm going to take a deeper look. I've been on the fence for trying one of these out becasue of the lack of crossover from the laptop to simply put it on at home. It would be pretty cool if Tivo teamed up with Yahoo and let you stream this via the home media option.
Posted by: kip | May 23, 2005 at 08:10 AM
Hey, you've got it wrong, yahoo's 6.99$ is equivalent to rhapsody's 8.99$. This is if you pay for the entire year together. On a per monthly basis its 10$ not 15$.
Posted by: Manjari Narayan | October 01, 2005 at 05:23 PM
I've been using Yahoo Unlimited for over a month and rhapsody for almost a year. Yahoo costs $6.99 Monthly or $5 per month if yearly. Yahoo is definitly worth the price. However out of the million songs they do offer there are quite a few I like missing. A lot of the times they'll have only the artists new ones and not the old ones. Or they'll have all the songs of an artist but only some can be played. It's not very fast as well. For now I think I would have to recommend Rhapsody or Napster. But if Yahoo's price stays down and their service improves (I think it will) than they will be the best choice. - Just my 2 cents.
Posted by: Matt | October 13, 2005 at 10:39 PM
Rhapsody lets me put all my playlists on 3 different PC's and 3 different MP3 players. I can change them - stream them through my car radio - whatever - except I can't give them to anyone else. Basically I rent 3 million songs and get new ones added every day. If I love it I buy it and download it. If I like it I just listen to it and leave it in the playlists. And I am letting my XM subscription go when renewal time comes.
Posted by: john saunders | February 25, 2007 at 03:51 PM
Just thought I would post a comment since this comes up so high in Google.... YMTG is no longer available. Not sure why they did this but now only the Yahoo Music subscription and downloads are able to be listened on a PC. Yahoo seems to be blindly implementing the Peanut Butter (YMTG, Bill Pay, etc...) without much regard to their users.
Posted by: James Johnston | October 08, 2007 at 12:57 PM