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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."
Pledge now! Time is running out! Point your browser to yahoomusic.com or itunes.com and inject us with cash so we have enough money to sue your ass over fair use.
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When I said buy, I was referring to the service. There are plenty of things we rent instead of purchasing outright. I think the subscription model is attractive to a large chunk of people.
Or it would be if all those people didn't have white earphones hanging out of their ears.
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.
So what? The MP3/digital portable audio market is still in it's infancy. I'd bet that most Americans still haven't heard of the Ipod, and quite a few still don't know what MP3's are. To assume the MP3 market is done and settled because everybody you is keepin up with the Joneses is pretty naive. Hell, I don't even own an ipod yet because I'm waiting for the reasonable priced knockoffs which may very well be WMA enabled.
Please, make me a playlist on the fly with your iRiver. What's that, you need to make your playlists on the computer ahead of time? What kind of digital player can only play one song at a time? Oh yeah, in the next firmware. Whenever that happens. Try making sense of the manual. Don't speak Korean, oh you're SOL. I originally bought one of these, had trouble with the nagivation, found the frequency of firmware updates pathetic, and the inability to make playlists was crap. Right onto ebay it went. Don't get me wrong the hardware is really really nice but third party software with instructions barely in English to get tagging to work? Cmon! Unless they've come leaps in bounds in the last year I would not inflict this device on anyone.
Jeff