Yahoo! Just came out with their new internet music offerings and it appears they’ve upped the anti over their competitors. Last year I belatedly found Yahoo’s Launchcast internet radio, and after playing with it for a week or two decided it was an amazing deal at $3.99 a month. Not only was this significantly less than the XM Sattelite Radio I was listening to, but you could set it up so that everything you heard was catered to your tastes based on your own ratings of genres, artists, albums, even individual songs. By doing this, Launchcast learns what kind of music you like based on other people who share your tastes and can offer up artists you may have not even heard of, but who are very much in tune with you.
With Launchcast, though, there were have been a couple of inherent problems, at least the way I saw it. First is the idea that you cannot tell Launchcast exactly what to play. It is, like a regular radio station, going to play songs in a somewhat random manner. If one is in the mood for a particular album or song, you’re out of luck. About the best you can do is create a custom mood, but all this does is let you specify a target genre to play, something you can do by just listening to one of the many non-customized Launchcast genre stations (or a standard radio station for that matter). In other words, Launchcast is not an “on-demand” service.
The other problem has been portability. One can listen to Launchcast anywhere that you have access to a high speed internet connection (and a computer that can listen to streaming Windows Media). While that may be great for home and office, even internet cafes, and hotels, it still doesn’t come close to the ubiquitous reach of Satellite Radio, which can be received anywhere in the U.S. at least if you are outside, and in many metropolitan areas when inside as well.
Yahoo!’s new offerings seem to solve both of these previous shortfalls, although perhaps not 100%. The new offerings are divided into two parts, Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited:
Yahoo! Music Engine gives you access to your own Launchcast station, but not the premium Launchcast Plus, so the songs are lower quality. The Engine is also the application itself which lets you play your own CD’s and MP3’s that are on your computer, burn music to CD, etc. You can search through the catalog and play 30 seconds of any song on demand and alternately buy it for $.99, similar to the way iTunes Music Store works. All of this is free.
Yahoo! Music Unlimited is the premium offering but includes everything that the Music Engine has. In addition, your Launchcast station is the premium Launchcast Plus with CD-quality songs. Secondly, one isn’t limited to 30 seconds of songs when doing the on-demand search and play - you hear the entire song, or entire album if you like. You can also purchase these songs for offline playing on a computer or device capable of playing Windows Media with copyright protection (DRM), and for a slightly cheaper $.79. Unfortunately neither my iPod nor my Treo 650 will play these files, but many other devices do have this capability.
Apparently Yahoo!’s competition (Napster and Rhapsody come the closest to offering the type of services Yahoo! does) costs $15/month, or at least $13.32 if purchased for a year. Yahoo! has priced their service to blow their competition out of the water. They are offering Yahoo! Music Unlimited for $6.99 per month, or $4.99 if you pay for a year at once. This is of course an increase above the Launchcast plus price of $3.99/$2.99 annually, but it is still a bargain compared to the higher priced services like Napster and Rhapsody.
My main use for these services is just to listen to music when I’m in the mood, but there are lots of other features that will be useful to others. One example is the integration with Yahoo! Messenger, so you can invite friends to listen to what you’re listening to, you can play what your friend is listening to, etc. You can also bookmark artists, albums, and songs for easy access (instead of having to search for them every time you want to play them), and even create an unlimited number of playlists from these bookmarks to play back at any time.
In addition to the built-in functionality, there is a growing community of plug-in developers that will allow all manner of additional features. These developers must have been using an early beta of Yahoo! Music Engine and Yahoo! Music Unlimited because they started submitting these months ago and there’s already a nice collection of them. One I downloaded was a minimal version of the player application so that it’s less obvious that I’m listening to music if someone happens to walk by and see my desktop screen at work. The mini version that comes with the application is not very good for this purpose! But there are tons of other plug ins that I want to play with and this is just a couple of days after the initial public release!
So, I said that Yahoo! has solved most of the “problems” of its earlier Launchcast service. But in my mind there is another issue remaining within the portability category. While you can download and transfer songs onto an MP3 player or a CD, this, in my mind, is still a somewhat clunky solution. It can also be a costly even at $.79 per song. In my mind, the whole idea of paying a subscription for content means that you shouldn’t have to shell out even more for whatever reason. I know, the idea is that you are charging people more so that they can listen to that content in whatever way they want, giving them more “rights” over it. But isn’t that what “fair use” is to begin with? I don’t know. I just can’t pay twice even if I’m getting something “more” for the added money. But that’s just me. Personally, I still thing the ultimate in killer music applications would be to have a portable Yahoo! Music Universal that would stream to your portable device over a wifi or even cellular network. Wifi is now available in many locations throughout the world, and is even being implemented as a municipal utility in some cities that will have blanket coverage over the entire city. Still this isn’t nearly the range that cellular phones carry. But now that higher speed EDGE and EV-DO networks are truly being rolled out here in the U.S and even faster networks in some parts of Asia, the issues of bandwidth is starting to go away. I really think this could be a possibility in the near future. Yahoo! representatives have said that they are looking at mobile options like the ones I mention, but of course there’s no timeframe or specifics they can offer those of us who are chomping at the bit.
Yahoo!’s competitor’s (even including Apple’s) stock prices have all fallen since the announcement indicating that Yahoo! really has something that could trounce the likes of Napster and Rhapsody, at least in the stock market’s assessment. I personally have not tried these other two services, so I can’t speak to how they compare, but I don’t believe that they have the customizable station based on ratings that Yahoo! has had for years, and of course they are signicantly more expensive – although that can be alleviated very quickly by them simply dropping their price in response to Yahoo!
In any case, I would highly recommend this option to you if you spend most of your time listening to music in a location where you have high-speed internet. The ability to call up any of over a million songs by a simple search is truly amazing. It’s kind of like having a 3 Terabyte iPod that you can instantly call up whatever you’re in the mood for. Also great and as far as I know not available in any of the other major internet music offerings is the ability to customize a random playlist of music (your Launchcast channel) that is created as you listen to and rate music. Yahoo! also makes all of this stuff very simple and straightforward. Their Yahoo! Music engine application is easy to operate and makes sense, and if you still are confused about features and functionality, you can always access their extensive and well-written help documentation. Definitely a great service!
Update: As you can see, I’ve crossed out the paragraph above where I talk about portability. Thanks to Matt New of Yahoo!, I’ve now gotten the correct info about portability and Yahoo!’s new music services, so I’ll try to explain them here:
Normally when you listen to songs via Yahoo! Music Unlimited, they are streamed to your computer. Alternately you can download individual files for playing on portable players or for burning onto CD. If you want to burn them onto CD, they are considered a “permanent download” and you have to pay - $.99 if you don’t have the premium Yahoo! Music Unlimited, or $.79 if you do.
If you only want to listen to them on a portable device (and not burn them to CD), you can indeed download them for free, given that the device is one of those that is “subscription-music compatible.” While these devices are still not very numerous, hopefully this will change soon. I can’t tell you how delighted and surprised I was to learn about this free downloading option. This does, in my mind solve the one remaining “problems” that YMU had in my mind. While it would be great to have a fully portable device (meaning being able to download or stream music from Yahoo! anywhere over the air via cell phone protocols like EDGE, EV-DO, or the upcoming HSDPA), this is really the next best thing, and perhaps even better in some ways because one doesn’t have to rely on having a good signal, but can just offload your music and have access to it wherever you go with your device.
While I think this portability truly makes YMU shine, for me it still isn’t an option unless I want to carry around a third gadget, and even for me that’s a bit much! I still will listen to YMU at home and work, but I already have two devices that I use to listen to audio, my Treo 650 Smartphone and my iPod. The main reason I have the iPod is the capacity, but also its ability to play Audio Books from Audible.com. Unfortunately the only device that is compatible with YMU that is also compatible with Audible is the Audiovox SMT5600 Pocket PC Phone, and the Dell Axim X50 and I already have a Treo 650 and I’m perfectly happy with it. Besides these devices will only give you enough room as what you can fit on their external SD memory, and right now 2GB is the largest capacity being sold. I really hope that Dell decides to make the Digital Jukebox Audible Compatible as it has done with it’s Axim, since I know that Apple is probably not going to introduce a feature that makes the iPod compatible with any other service or software that ones that Apple owns!
In the mean time, I just wanted to point everyone to a quick interview with Ian Rogers on Make Magazine’s Podcast. Ian talks about all the great plug-ins that can be and are being coded for use with the Yahoo! Music Engine. That reminds me I have to start downloading more to play around with! I see that Ian also left a comment below, so thanks, Ian, as you read, Matt cleared everything up for me.
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Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central has been talking about an upcoming announcement on his podcast for weeks. Well this morning I finally listened to his show #64 that he had been touting with great fanfare. The news, as it happens, is that Todd has teamed up with Wiley Publishing to produce the first of what will sure soon be an avalanche of books about podcasting. The book is titled Podcasting: Do it Yourself Pirate Radio For the Masses.