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Yahoo Introduces Competitor for iTunes
LadyDeath writes "After a year in development, Yahoo has launched its competitor to Apple's iTunes and Napster To Go, a subscription and download music service priced at only $4.99 per month. Tracks are offered in 192Kbps WMA, and can be transferred to portable devices. Perhaps most interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that the Yahoo! Music Engine is built on an open platform that facilitates plug-ins - both DLL and Web based. Podcasting and video playback plug-ins are already available." Update: 05/11 13:06 GMT by T : ian c rogers, formerly of Nullsoft, just led the build of the media player, and writes with information about "the the plugin architecture it supports as well as some of the 20 plugins that are already available for it.
I've posted my thoughts on why someone should or shouldn't use the Yahoo! Music Engine on my blog."
But, given how much market share the iPod (in all its incarnations) currently has, the prospect of being a Windows user with just a WMA player seems unlikely. If the iPod was just for the Mac, then yeah, you'd be right. But with the iPod also working with Windows, it gave the iPod the market share it now has... which is somewhere around 70%-75% or so of hard drive music players.
Sure, there's more "choice" for Windows users with the ability to buy multiple brands of players with WMA support... but this choice hasn't been cutting into the iPod's market share, or at least not in any noticeable way as of yet.
I don't have any sort of portable digital music player, but if I did, I'd get an iPod, and for various reasons. It's compact and easy to use; it has a decent battery life; and since I have a Mac, it can easily act as a FireWire external hard drive if I need it to. The music I have on my iBook is 4.59 GB... so I could get myself a 40 GB iPod and still have 35 GB of space for other things besides music. I could currently back up my entire hard drive's contents (music included) and still have almost 11 GB left over on a 40 GB iPod.
I can't think of any WMA players that would let me do that, or at least none that would let me do that easily.
How come we bash Microsoft's monopolizing tactics but praise Apple for doing pretty much the same thing with iPods and iTMS?
Because, as has been said a million times, there's nothing monopolistic about the iPod. You can play MP3s on the iPod JUST FINE. Don't sell WMA, and you'll be alright. And don't say that the RIAA won't allow it, because emusic.com has been selling non-DRM plain vanilla MP3s for some time now.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
It's called "MP3".
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I mean, let's say the average subscriber is 20, and keeps this service until they are 100. That's 80 years at 5 bucks a month, or around 5,000 dollars.
This doesn't account for inflation over those 80 years, nor the price hike that happens about a year from now because Yahoo Music can't get enough subscribers to justify the low price of the service.
Every time they add another 100 CDs to the library, it's like you got them for free.
Yep, a whole $5 a month worth of free.
Who cares if it's DRM'd, as long as you can listen to what you want when you want.
Exactly! So what if you're forced to use Microsoft certified hardware and Microsoft certified software? So what if you decide to switch to another service that all your music, even the music on your portable device, gets automatically deleted thanks to the Microsoft Janus DRM? So what if you get tied into the service just to keep your existing music working, even though you don't usually listen to new music and download maybe only one or two new songs every month (like, in fact, most people over the age of 25 do according to the most recent polls).
The only major downside of DRM, if it's unobtrusive enough, is that you can't give away the music to others.
Yeah. I mean, who needs to share their interests with their friends anyway?
And while the music is lossy, 192k WMA is like 384k MP3 - which doesn't even exist, since 320k is the maximum quality (at least on any software I know of)
a) 384 kbps MP3 does exist. It's called "freeformat" and MP3 can go up to 640kbps.
b) 192k WMA is closer to 160k MP3, if you're using the proper encoders (read: LAME).
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.