Today was the official launch of Yahoo! Music Unlimited beta. I've been using it for several months as it's been in build mode and I'm very happy it's launched. I'm listening to it right now. The Resident's new album called "Animal Lover" very cool that they even have it. When I first played with it I was afraid that the selection wouldn't be that large, but now it seems to be very deep. 1 Million songs. A decent indie selection, good fidelity, and pretty easy to use. You can't argue with the price point. 6 bucks a month for all the music you can handle. Not too bad.
I don't have a PC at home, but this is making me think I might want to purchase one. Especially now that a good PC costs about a couple of weekends worth of walking around money. It only works on a PC and only with non ipod audio players.
Here's how it works, if you don't know. You pay a monthly fee of about 6 dollars or you can pay up front for a whole year. That's a little less. Just like Napster or Rhapsody, you can listen to or download any song in their catalog and transfer it to your music player. You can listen to it all you want either on your PC, streamed from their server or on your audio player. As long as you pay the monthly fee. You can purchase the album or song for to keep for about .79 cents a song. Then it's yours forever. If iTunes did this, I'd be all over it. But since they don't, I'm considering buying a PC... funny.
After using it for the day, I've noticed that the display of the pages and search results is a bit slow. But the streaming is good. The interface is still a tad clunky, but that could be due to the slowness. If it's sped up I might feel differently.
It has recommendations that are personalized based on your LaunchCast profile and behavior on the service. These work very well. You have access to your LaunchCast station. Probably the coolest feature is that you can access songs from your friends that use the service who are connected to you through Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Anything on their drive, you can hear. iTunes has network views, but it's nothing like this. Using your IM contacts is awesome.
If I could improve anything it would be the speed of the tool. I would make sure that any song or album had its own unique url so that it can be linked to from sites, blogs, etc. I would allow users to view all new releases for that week. That's one thing I like about iTunes. It really has a retail feel that I like. It's very well merchandised. I would make sure this application had that same presentation or at least access to it. It's not enough to see recommended new releases for me. The interface is a tad complicated and fragile feeling. Even though it's heavy, I still think there's too much going on, it's busy. The good thing is that all of this can be improved. I would also like to see it manage podcasts and offer user reviews of songs and albums. I think this is a great product, and I'm happy for Ian and the team that built it. They should be proud.
While writing this I changed the album to the Meat Puppets, Up on the Sun. Great album.
Ian Rogers - Why You Should (or Should Not) Use the Yahoo! Music Engine
