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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."
pointless DRM based lossy music service. Just what we all need. When will "they" realise that this isn't going to cut the mustard?
$60 a year for music? I bet that this will encourage the prices of WMA players to drop, and hackers cracking the WMA format. By June 2005, we will have unlimited mp3's for $60 a year. Maybe somebody will create a file sharing network that will decrease the price even further.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I don't know how a music service that's intended to provide music for "portable players" can succeed when its format doesn't support the player that has 70 - 80% marketshare. It just seems like a losing proposition from the get-go.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The lifestyle segment will use iTunes.
The power music consumers will use allofmp3.
What segment are Yahoo selling to exactly, the confused?
My blog
It's hardly going to be a threat to iTunes. The DRM WMA files won't play on ipods, which have over 80% of the hard disk player market and 58% of the flash player market.
I'm really getting sick and tired of all these competeing, incompatible and crippled formats.
All I want is a standard format to purchase music in, that works on every player and that allows me to freaking do with the music I bought what I want.
T3 ani i2 users (like myself) are gonna bankrupt Yahoo and Napster. Do these companies have any limits at all? Otherwise, they are doomed. I could easily download thousands of songs in a day, bursting their $5 threshold. The majority of users won't download that much. I'm sure they have educated economists working it out, but when I see something that looks too good to be true it's usually because it is and I'll get reamed by some legal clause or their company's might as well skip to chapter 11.
"Man, I am so unbelievably stupid."
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.
Maybe I can use this service in Linux, but I'm not permitted to play WMA files in Linux - I know, there are codecs (I have them), but they are reverse engineerd, and AFAIK not legal outside Europe.
I, along with MILLIONS of people world wide, own an iPod (and an iPod Shuffle). They are, for my money, the best portable music players available. They sure aren't the cheapest - but I'm not a consumer for whom the prices is the main selling point.
That said, my players won't play WMA, which makes Yahoo's years of development a moot point.
I guess that the millions of 15-35 year olds who paid a premium price for our players aren't Yahoo's target market.
That's the problem right there. When will someone wise up and give us lossless, reasonably-priced downloads? Until then I'll continue to use BitTorrent.
Stop trying to justify your copyright infringement. You don't care about paying anyone, or you'd just buy regular CDs and get your lossless music that way. You really don't understand how to get what you want as a consumer. You stop using the product until they give you what you want. Taking it without permission still perpetuates your reliance on their product.
There are artists who sell lossless, reasonably priced downloads. Put your money where your mouth is.
Paying £3 (roughly converted) for unlimited downloads is unappealing because you can't keep a copy? Presumably in the same manner that paying £15 a month for unlimited SkyTv is unappealing bc you don't own a vcr and so can't keep a copy? (Not saying I find it attractive either, just pointing out how it could be to some people).
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
Regular CDs are very bad for the environment. They are pure pollution. Think of future generations, do not buy DVD or CD media! And please do not encurage other people to contribute to the destruction of our planet by telling them to buy such immoral things. And the user did not encurage to justify copyright infrinement, most BitTorrent users are mature and more evolved than you apparently are, BitTorrent users generally only download the broad range of LEGAL torrents with artists who are sensible enough to release their music under a creative commons license -- generally they also do not download copyrighted music because they do not want to justify the facist-like MPAAs attempts at gaining more power.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
If you own something you really really like, and it happens to be popular, that doesn't feel wrong.
If you own something you hate and despise, but try as you might you can't find a reasonable alternative, that feels very wrong.
This is perfectly normal. Even ordinary people dislike Windows, but there isn't much choice a lot of the time. People adore their iPods.
Now, if we ever get to a point where people don't like their iPods and they are unhappy they can't move their music, then people will start complaining. This is probably inevitable, and will be messy.
Until then, people are happy. They are listening to their music. Happy people don't complain much. It's really that simple. So... fucking... simple. Dude, come on. How is that not obvious?
Just like Napster implies that's the case. Isn't it funny how WMA-based services tend to advertise themselves as MP3-based services? It's like WMA is unwanted by the marketplace, and service providers have to lie about it to sell product.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I keep all my music on my computer as fairly high quality MP3s, but nearly all of the new music I acquire now comes from CDs, even though I have used iTunes in the past. Using eBay or Amazon Marketplace it sometimes half as much, and the CD becomes a backup as soon as I rip it. If I lose the file, I have no trouble ripping it again, and I always have a high quality copy of the album stored away.
It just seems like CDs are still win-win, whereas the only advantage online music stores have is that you get the music instantly.
$5 a month for the rest of my life for a huge library of music is an awesome deal. $5 a month for that library until the service folds and I'm left with no music isn't all that attractive.
I'd have to disagree with that, really. If a subscription service dies, you just switch to another one. You haven't lost anything because you never bought anything in the first place. The DRM'd files on the harddrive are just a temporary cache, not a "collection" to worry about backing up. This assumes, of course, that you don't find yourself forced to buy proprietary hardware for each individual service, in which case you'd lose that investment.
(Whether subscription based services are really a good deal or not is another matter entirely that varies significantly from person to person.)
Everyone seems to be getting into downloadable music game (I half expect to see a headline announcing Google Music one of these days).
But is this a currently profitable market, or are they gambling on it being so in the future?
The last financial briefing of Apple Computer stated that they had achieved "about break even" for the quarter.
Break even? When iTunes is the currently the biggest thing around. Why even bother. Presumably for Apple, it's to provide a service to encourage more iPod sales with an easy way to fill them with music. But are the other services gambling on a future where many more people are buying downloads?
What if it's another dotcom, where everyone is jumping into the game, but the profits just don't eventuate...?
DRM is not about control of the music as it pertains to customers giving it away. In the long haul, RIAA is trying hard to make sure that they control the paltform. Right now, their worst nightmare is that the music downright cheap to produce. In addition, the Internet is offering cheap PR/marketing. It is only a matter of time before the net wrest music production from RIAA/Labels and allows every musicians to own their own future.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So all this is really is a cheaper Napster. Whoopee. It's still separate per-track pricing if you want to buy burnable music, and it still only works with WMA-supporting devices. The one thing Yahoo brings to the table here seems to be the fairly easy plugin extensibility, but it's not for supporting other formats, it's more for "cool stuff".
So, in balance, it's a "nothing to see here, move along", but with the Yahoo brand name associated with it. No one WMA music store has been able to make a big splash so far, because of two things: the iPod rules the market at every price point, and thus far the market really is not terribly interested in subscription-based music - despite the endless efforts of the WMA-based companies and the music industry to convince us otherwise.
In the unlikely event that subscriptions start taking off, Apple'll just add it to iTMS, anyways. Short of a sudden overnight shift in consumer tastes, this Yahoo store will just be fighting for their piece of the 20% of the market that simply refuses to associate with anything Apple.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
If microsoft did make a version of Media player specifically for linux, does anyone think they'd get any credit for having done it?
I think its a no win situation for Microsoft in a niche market that more receptive of any solution so long as it's not Microsoft.
To compete with anybody, you have to create market advantage. Going it on Price alone is pretty tough unless you price is REALLY low.
Yahoo! has combined several elements that make this subscription service worth the price of two cups of Coffee at Starbucks:
- Low price that undercuts competition by 50% +
- $0.79 song burn ability.
- Build your own/120 pre-built radio stations that stream commercial free music to your desktop (look out XM/Sirus?)
- plugins for Instant Messenger and other applications that allow you to recommend songs to friends
- Decent 1M song catalog to choose from (though 33% smaller than Apple's 1.5M - too bad)
Yahoo! obviously looked at the landscape and said "we can't be on the iPod and we have to use WMA DRM, so how can we offer something competetive based on what exists today?"
Now, I don't think Yahoo! is going to get the volumes to make this service profitable since $0.99 downloads don't leave much margin for, well, margin. But the service just might put pressure on Apple to release their own subscription service. And that would be a good thing.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Maybe. That's the problem with economics, it always assumes a rational consumer ;-)
Please, you don't "own" ANYTHING with iTunes either. You just get a different license (burnable to CD, not transferable to other PC).
Don't believe me? See what happens when you crash your hard drive.
Anyway, if you want the same rights as iTunes, Yahoo has that too (at $0.79/song).
To me, this is the best of both worlds; you can sample/download as many songs as you want for $5/month and if you find something you really like, you can buy that for $0.79 so that you can burn it on CD. AND you can download it to the latest WMA players.
Isn't choice supposed to be a good thing?
This idea that Apple is behaving like Microsoft by not supporting WMA playback is insane. Microsoft were the ones that ran off can came up with their own proprietary format in the first place! Apple is supporting the playback of open standards (mp4) and the most common format out there (mp3). How shocking that they do not support the proprietary format their competitor came up with for the sake of screwing them!
only if you want all the songs on the album and don't have to pay any transportation costs
There are 3 primary (legal) ways to get your music now.
1. Buy a CD
Pro: This is the most flexible option. You can burn as many times as you want, get the highest quality sound, nice storage format (CD's are nice and thin and you can fit thousands on a bookshelf), etc.
Con: This is also the most expensive method, especially when you count all the bad tracks on a typical album.
2. Buy a permanent download license for a digital track
Pro: You can burn to a CD (which you can turn into MP3). Your license does not go away as long as your PC does not go away. Download to select portable devices.
Con: Not as high fidelity as CD. Per song price is not better than a CD, if you lose your license somehow, it is good as dead.
3. Get a subscriptioni license for a digital track
Pro: Cheapest by FAR (per song)! Can download to select WMA portable devices.
Con: Not as high fidelity as CD. Your license goes away if you end your service.
Just choose whatever fits you best. What is wrong with that?
If it takes off the music companies will want more money for their catalogs. So your whole premise is that the introductory price will never rise (and I'm not talking about inflation).
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
EVERY @#$@# MUSIC PLAYER WILL PLAY MP3.
The LOCK-IN is that an ipod supports only ONE music service (that offers RIAA files of course).
Because Microsoft is willing to license their DRM (which, ONCE AGAIN is REQUIRED in some form to sell RIAA files -- which is what the mass market wants) while Apple is NOT willing to license their DRM.
If you have an Ipod, you can buy RIAA music from exactly ONE online vendor. Apple.
On the other hand, if you have ANY one of the MANY brands of WMA players, you can buy RIAA music from MULTIPLE online vendors because, once again Microsoft, the big evil corportation, are willing to license their DRM.
Yes, it flies in the face of reason that Apple, who "doesn't make money off itunes, only off ipods" would NOT want to expand their ipod customer base by allowing music from other servicees to play on their portable. Well, it does if you really believe that Apple doesn't view itunes as a cashpot (either currently or in the future).
Please! Love your ipod if you want, but face reality just a LITTLE bit.
I have SBC Yahoo DSL. First they give you a discount price for a year, then they jack up the price after that. When I called them about lower priced offers, they say I can get that only if I also get the $80+ per month phone service.
When Yahoo says they charge an introductory price of $5 per month the first year, that means they're going to charge you more after that. And since they're using MS Janus technology, if you don't renew your subscription for next year the software will delete all the songs you've acquired for the first year.
Subscription services aren't really a competitor to buying music. You're not paying to own music, as you point out. You're paying to be able to listen to any of the ~ 50,000 albums they own, instantly, from your computer. The two important points are: 1) this is not a service that would be reasonable to expect for free 2) it is a service that is eminently useful if you spend much time near Windows and like a wide variety of music.
The same point you made comes up every time there's an article about subscription services. I'm not sure how else to say it: you are paying to be able to listen to any of tens of thousands of albums, instantly, from your computer. If that's not attractive to you, fair enough, but stop criticizing it for failing to be something it's not trying to be.
"I paid money every month for my music, then it all went away because they had a crappy business model." Tragic.
..."
..."
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"I paid money every month for my electricity, then it all went away
"I paid money every month for my water, then it all went away
"I paid money every month for my cell phone, then it all went away
You aren't paying money every month to buy music, any more than you're paying money every month to buy a cell tower. What you are paying for is the ability to listen to any of the tens of thousands of albums they own, instantly, from your computer. This is not a service that is free to provide, it's not a service that can be replaced by buying CDs, and it's not a service that they don't deserve to make a profit on.
If it's not a service you find useful, fine, but stop treating it like an alternative to buying CDs. It fills a totally different niche, and does it well at a fair price. I'd fund that.
As long as the consumer knows up front that Yahoo may change the price at any time, that continued subscription is required to keep what you've 'bought' (I don't know if this is even true for the Yahoo service), then what the hell is your problem? Just don't subscribe if you don't like those terms.
I agree, however I feel it necessary to point out that they're not exactly advertising those terms real loudly, are they? I didn't notice the fine print on Napster ToGo's commercials that said "unsubscribing makes your portable player delete all the music you put on it by itself" or anything. I think that it's not widely understood, by the consumer, that the new "Plays For Sure" players will auto-expire your subscription music after some amount of time. It's not an obvious thing to expect to happen.
Regarding copying for your friends.. that is not 'fair use'.
I would argue otherwise, but even if it's not fair use, I would suggest that the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (section 1008) makes non-commercial use like this immune to civil actions alleging infringement of copyright. So while it may or may not be Fair Use, it's also not illegal to do.
If a service doesn't let you (easily) copy music, that may be a draw back of the service, but it is not the human rights violation that some make it out to be. It's a condition of the music companies license to the service.
True, and I never said otherwise.
The whole bit about MS deleting all your music? Please. Let's talk about reality. MS certified hardware? Hilarious. Why do you kooks always assume that 'Trusted Computing' is a given? Furthermore, why do you think that MS will deliberately piss off all of its customers?
What? You think I'm making this shit up? It's made very clear in the Windows Media 10 SDKs. it's what the whole frickin' Janus DRM is about. It happens [i]right now[/i] if you use Napster ToGo or this new Yahoo Music Service in combination with a "Plays For Sure" player device. It was [i]expressly designed[/i] to do exactly that. This isn't paranoia, it's an honest statement of the facts of the matter.
These services only work on MS Certified hardware. The "Plays For Sure" logo is the certification program Microsoft runs to certify any given player. Look it up! They're not even trying to hide this stuff. They make it's a *selling point* of the Janus DRM for crying out loud.
- 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.
Disclaimer: I don't own a digtial musice player, but if I did it would be an iPod and there are a nujmber of reasons behind that.
1. Confusion. There is a problem with the various Windows WMA music stores, a big problem: There are too many of them. Napster, Yahoo, MSN, Coke, Wallmart etc. Yahoo's store looks like the cheapest/month, at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that some other store will somehow compete pretty soon. The problem is that these stores are not compatible with one another (obviously) and that there is no vast difference between them. While they all offer subscription, only a few offer the ability to download and buy single tracks. This cannot be stated enough. All of these stores are fighting amongst one another for a small slice of the market. They all claim to be "The iPod/iTunes alternative", but the reality is that they fight amongst one another for the paying twice for the same song. Once to listen to it on subscription, and twice to "own" it forever.
3. Features vs. Ease of use. All of these stores, and especially this Yahoo one, offer loads of features. Look at this idiot geek wetting himself about features like skins and plug-ins. He's basically saying that WinAmp is now part of an online store. The thing is that one of the reasons that the iPod and iTunes is so popular is that it is very very simple. It offers a basic, easy to understand business model. Basically, it is, you pay for a song and you can play and do with it what you want afterwards, basta.
The iPod doesn't have built in TV, FM, or a razor. It just plays music. It's also simple.
Most people just want to listen to their music that they bought. They are not interested in skins for the player, or OGG format or having to fork out next month's payment.
4. All of Apple's competitors complain about the iPod and iTunes not being "open". What they are essentially complaining about is that they don't have a slice of the pie. If they were in Apple's position, they wouldn't open their stuff to Apple either.