Yahoo Music Unlimited Price Going Up
This email just jumped into my inbox from Yahoo regarding an increase in the monthly fee for Yahoo Music Unlimited:
On November 14, 2006, the cost of a new Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription will increase from $6.99 to $8.99 per month. Despite this price increase, Yahoo! Music Unlimited will still offer the lowest price of any major subscription music service - now with a catalog of more than 2 million songs!
They are keeping the old price the same until December 14 for current subscribers. It only affects the monthly rate, you can still sign up and pay for a full year and get it at $4.99/mo.
I originally subscribed about 6 months ago because I thought it would be cool. I have an iPod so unfortunately none of Yahoo’s music (with the trust Micro$oft DRM) is compatible with it. Sure I could use something like Tunebite, but what’s the point. Too much of a hassle.
Now that I’ve found Pandora, I don’t listen to anything else. And why should I– Pandora is everything that I want and more. Interestingly, when I went to cancel my Yahoo Music Unlimited account, they begged me to stay by comping me an extra month. I haven’t listened to it for about a month now. The software is clunky, crashes too often and seems to require an update every so often, which prompts for a reboot of my computer. Thanks to the stupid DRM, I have to login and synch my collection that I have on my computer every 7 days or so. All of that is annoying and gets in the way of my enjoyment of the music (which is why I subscribed in the first place.
Not to mention that the interface is really slow, jittery at times, and just plain boring. Its impossible to find the music I want sometimes, leaving me with a playlist that is the same old stuff.
Once the free month is up (November 14), I will be cancelling thank you very much. It was a nice experiment, but there really was no point to it. Not with Dreammachine, Pandora and a few others that give me the music I want, for free. Streaming ecstasy. I’ve been tempted to try out Rhapsody’s service, but it seems like it will be only a slight upgrade from what Yahoo is offering.
Subscription based music services seem like a great idea and I was really happy with Yahoo Music Unlimited when I first subscribed. There are other options that are available to me now though, and free or not, they are better and have my attention. I’m not sure what the fix is for Yahoo and others, but they don’t seem to be sustainable unless they can offer more.
