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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."
...devices supporting Microsoft's Janus digital rights management technology. jon.... Jon?
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.
Forget that WMD thing we never found across the planet, there's WMA right here and WMV around the corner.
The problem is, either it's DRM'd or "very few songs". The condition for obtaining permission for selling many of the songs (from RIAA) is that they are DRM'd.
But in the other hand, I wonder if they could go with a hybrid service - DRM only what has to be DRM'd, release the rest as "open". (even if that "only" was to mean 80% of their catalogue)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I tried it out, the DRM is an annoying voice at the beginning of each song that goes "Yahooooooooo-oooooo!". Noone will copy that!
If you're paying $60 a year for music and buying a WMA player, what does hackers cracking the DRM have to do with anything?
By June 2005, we will have unlimited mp3's for $60 a year.
The only thing different from what's available now is "mp3". If you have a Windows computer and a WMA player, the restrictive DRM still lets you do everything you need to, namely play music. It's nice to be the first guy to say "I can't wait until they crack this," but chances are, nothing will change for you when they crack it.
$60 a year for music is cheap, especially for people like me who don't appreciate the value of building up a music collection yet. If their DRM allows you to do everything you plan to do with the music, then buy it. Novel concept, eh?
If the DRM doesn't allow you to do what you want, buy music from likeminded artists.
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.
pointless DRM based lossy music service.
It's mainly a subscription based service. It doesn't matter if it's lossy, because you're never converting the music to another format. Ever.
When will "they" realise that this isn't going to cut the mustard?
I'm willing to bet that this does cut the mustard for most people. If you use Windows and have a WMA player, this service seems fine as long as you don't mind all your music self destructing when you stop paying. But honestly, at $5 a month for music, I'd be willing to pay that for quite some time. That's the lowest monthly bill I'd have, and I'd get to access a huge library of music on demand.
Too bad I use Linux and have an iPod shuffle.
"They" will realize it doesn't cut the mustard the moment that "you" realize that 99% of the consumers out there don't care whether it's DRM'd (so long as it's not incredibly prohibitive) or whether it's in a lossy format. Ever realize how most people can't tell the difference between FM and a CD?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
somehow the idea of paying $5 a month, even for unlimited downloads, is unappealing if i dont actuallly own the music. As much as I hate the nature of DRM at least Apple has come the close to drawing a balance between user control and "artists" rights. as fun as it might be to have unlimited access to music downloads I think the psycological barrier of not actually owning the music will keep most consumers out. At least with iTunes when you buy a song you allways have the option to burn an audio or Mp3 cd.
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.
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.
The evil genius behind some of DRM is that it's hardly crackable (except with some serious quality loss.) If it's in software, it probably will be crackable. If in hardware, much harder.
The idea is that you get all the data encrypted. You can copy, share, spread, mangle, edit it, whatever - it's useless like that anyway. When you want to play it on a DRM-based device, you must first connect to a key server. Your device identifies itself, a secure handshake is performed (man in the middle won't help much, public keys of the device and the server have been exchanged at the manufacture time), then receives the key to decrypt the song, so it can be played. Of course the key may include additional instructions like limit, so you can play it within next 10h and then it should be disabled, or you can play it once only (pay per view), or such, and the device must obey them (otherwise it wouldn't be DRM-approved). In software you should be able to intercept the key, then bundling it with the song, or releasing it decrypted you could keep copying it. For embedded devices it's much harder because you won't be able to authenticate as the keyserver or the device and the key is transferred by secure means. All you can do is to re-encode the analog output, i.e the video or audio that is being sent to screen/speakers. With obvious quality loss. Anyway, still, to obtain the key you must "purchase" it by some legal means, i.e. the DRM'd song contains unique ID with a flag "paid", then you get the key and the ID is removed from the "paid" list so when the key expires for some reason (i.e. pay per view), you need to pay again. Also, someone else with a copy of your song won't get the same key again without paying again...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
$4.99 a month is great - really great. If I was running a platform that could play WMA I might even consider it but my Mac and my iPod won't play it. These format wars suck.
Aside from a non-compatible format, I can't stand the thought of all my music going away if I don't want to subscribe anymore. Yes, I can then decide to buy the music but then you're faced with "Okay, I want to stop my subscription and keep these 50 albums but I don't have $500 to lay out right now." Then what? Live without the music or take out a loan.
As a consumer of iTunes music, I am seriously considering going back to CD's so I get the full audio quality, the artwork and I can do whatever I want with it (i.e. send an mp3 to a friend 'hey, check these guys out - you might like them', etc.). While the iTunes DRM is fairly non-intrusive, I'm disliking DRM in any form more and more. I want my music for the long term. I want my kids to be able to play it 20 years from now if they want. I have zero guarantee of being able to do that with my iTunes DRMed music.
Subscription-based services practically guarantee I won't be able to do any of those things.
It must be nice to watch this battle over the niche WMA market unfold from the comfort of Cupertino. These subscription services are a disaster waiting to happen. The WMA market isn't large enough to sustain all the vendors out there. Once the first subscription service folds, everyone will stay far, far away from them. "I paid money every month for my music, then it all went away because they had a crappy business model." Tragic.
With Apple's model, there's no dependence on Apple's success for your music to play. You don't even have to depend on any specific hardware because you can burn it all to CD. $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.
Someone needs to point me to the venture capital firms that back things things (except in Yahoo's case). I have an idea for a company. I think I'm going to call it Webvan.
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.
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.
How exactly would a portable player connect to a remote key server?
When will "they" realise that this isn't going to cut the mustard?
"They" will allow non-DRM formats when people stop sharing them with a few million of their closest friends. That's pretty much the only reason that Joe User would want a non-DRM solution. And yahoo would find it quite difficult to make people delete all of their music after unsubscribing from their service using the "honor system" alone.
It isn't like their going to give in and let everyone have the music for free.
More
If you're willing to swap Firewire for USB, the iRiver hd-based players support WMA (as well as mp3 and ogg) and meet the rest of your requirements.
Mine (an iHP-120) came with a CD, but I've never even unwrapped it. The player presents itself as a mass storage device and Just Works.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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!
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.
The current market research doesn't necessarily agree.
Oh, sure, you could argue "only" 22 million Americans is not that big of a number, percentage-wise, but you have to realize that those 22 million Americans also have friends and family members, and once you do, you'll also realize that it's highly unlikely anybody in this country has not heard of the iPod.
It's also more remarkable that this survey did not even include teenagers. So the numbers are likely considerably higher than even that already impressive number.
The mp3 player market is not in its infancy. This is a fallacy that a lot of Apple's competitors seem to like to tell themselves to help them sleep at night. It's a young market, yes, but it is already pretty saturated. It's very hard to get 22 million adult Americans to buy anything collectively, let alone something that was considered a luxury product for ubergeeks just a couple of years ago.
Nokia and others are betting the other way; that the market for standalone digital audio players is going to start to level out soon, and the remaining market (primarily comprised of those who don't need the capacity or battery life of the higher-end players) will turn to cell phones for their music. Obviously, this will still lock out services like Yahoo or Napster.
That's not to say these companies can't make money selling music to the small market they have. But they will never be a serious threat to Apple and the iPod. Sorry, but that's just the reality. Apple is entrenched in a market that has become saturated faster than any I can ever remember.
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.