Yahoo Music Unlimited 1.1

Pros: fun and cool music research capabilities

Cons: the whole rental thing

Summary: Yahoo’s Y!Unlimited music browse/rent/buy service is a mix of good and bad. The free music engine has some interesting integration features that make the whole music experience interesting and kinda fun. However, certain other features, or lack thereof, make the service’s significance questionable. Although I have only tested this service for a short time and have not tested any other service, I will share a little bit of my experience.

While playing with the radio feature (there are dozens of different types of “stations,” I recognized a particular reggae song which I hadn’t heard for years. I clicked on the artist, Shabba Ranks, and I was “transferred” to the Y!Unlimited page, which showed me several of the artist’s albums. I clicked on the “play” button of one of the albums and liked what I heard. So I started downloading the songs to my hd, in my special folder that has all my other downloaded or ripped songs, legal or otherwise. As the songs from the Shabba Ranks album were downloading, I clicked on the “Create playlist of similar artists” buttons. Instantly, I had a playlist that I could save, entitled “like Shabba Ranks.” The songs and artists were actually closely related although I couldn’t figure out how a few, like Quincy Jones and LL Cool J, made it to the list. [I think that the first 50 songs on the list are related, then after that they seem pretty disconnected.] On any song on the list you can right click and it gives you about 10 options for that particular song. For me, both the streaming and the downloading of the music were fairly quick (I have about 1.3K mbps DSL service). One can keep exploring in such a way, or of course perform a search for an artist, song, or album. These are only a couple (of many) features that are way cool about the service.

The rental process seems weird though. If I download all these songs, albums, etc., I can only play them on my computer (or I guess have them shared by other people who also have the subscription?), or upload them onto a relatively few mp3 players (it requires special software to read the copy-protected songs). I cannot, however, burn them onto a CD to play in my car or my living room. Also, if I quit the service, the songs become unplayable after a short time. [This is not noticeably written anywhere in Yahoo’s literature. I heard about it from some of the reviews I’ve read.] So is it worth $7 a month? Maybe. For a very cool way of browsing for songs that you might eventually buy for $.79 each [or maybe browse for and then download from a different P2P program, hint hint], or researching various artists, etc., in many different ways, it may be worth it. But if you keep the rental service, and if you download the stuff onto your hd, you’ll be more likely to never leave the service in order to preserve your downloaded but copy-righted music. For example, if I have 500 “rented” songs on my hd, which I’ve spent countless hours downloading and organizing, I’ll be less inclined to cancel the service if I someday want to switch to a better or cheaper service. Why? Because the “rented” music will be vaporized if it’s not periodically checked-in with the Yahoo service. All that time and effort wasted. That seems to be a real “gotcha” that you have to consider. I have to admit, the downloaded songs do sound superior to the streamed ones, especially if you later listen to them on Realplayer, not on Yahoo’s beta music engine (which badly needs an equalizer).

So, if you like to listen to fairly good quality music on your computer (perhaps used as a hookup to your main sound system), and/or enjoy the cool research abilities of the service, then it may be well worth checking out. You do have a 7 day period to test and cancel, so what the heck?