Two Services that Might be Raising the Bar?

Before you get any ideas please note that this post has nothing to do with AT&T. In a previous post, we gave you some information about how Online Music Downloading works. Recently, there have been two services that have really interested me, so I decided to try them out. This is more of a review than a comparison, but it’s combined in the same post.

1) Yahoo! Music Unlimited - This is one of the best services for online music that I have seen. Sadly, they’ve removed Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go, which allowed FREE transfer to portable players with a subscription.

With Yahoo! Music Unlimited, from now on to be referred to as YMU, you can download unlimited songs if you want to be able to play them on your computer. The subscription costs $5.99 per month if you subscribe for a full year, or $8.99 on a per-month basis. However, if you want to have tracks that you can burn onto a CD or place on your MP3 player (aka .WMA format), you need to pay an additional $.79 per song. On the other hand, CURRENT iTunes costs $.99 per song, with no additional fee (keep in mind that Apple will probably release a subscription-based service of their own). Therefore, to be more efficient with Yahoo! Music Unlimited, you need to download over 360 songs per year in “burnable” format that you can place on your MP3 player or burn to a CD. Although they say you can’t put it on your iPod, it’s very easy to convert these files to MP3’s that can be placed on the iPod (perfectly legally, I figure). While 360 songs sounds like a lot; there’s another key factor - no 30 second samples. iTunes lets you listen to 30 seconds of any song for free before buying it, while Yahoo! Music Unlimited lets you download the ENTIRE song to your computer FOR FREE. Sadly, when you quit paying for a subscription, the files are no longer playable on your computer. Bundled with Yahoo! Music Jukebox, Yahoo! Music Unlimited is really a great service. However, it does cost a lot of money - and with the cancellation of YMU To Go (meaning no more subscription-based transferring to an MP3 player), it really went downhill. However I just found a service by the name of SoundTaxi that actually converts from these DRM protected formats to burnable formats, for only 40 dollars. For $120 a year, you get unlimited music that is perfectly legally. If you really want to bend the rules, you can pay for 1 month of subscription, download all the music you want (like I mean THOUSANDS of songs), SoundTaxi it, and voila! I would recommend signing up for a month to see if you like it, and give your iTunes a break (you only need to download 45 songs in that month to make it more efficient than iTunes if you pay per month). What brings Yahoo! Music Unlimited above the other subscription services? Well, it’s got a great selection for a great prices. Plus, there are rumors that Yahoo! is expanding it’s services even further, so expect word on this in the near future! Yahoo! Music Unlimited is definitely superior to Napster in my eyes.

2) iTunes Unlimited - So far, this is a complete rumor, with almost no factual evidence other than an article on the Financial Times. Last year, Nokia released a “comes with music” plan that allows people to download ALL the music they want from the Universal record label with the purchase of their multimedia device. Apple is considering releasing a similar feature with the iPod. The fact that Apple should do something, and do something quickly, is evident in consumers and Apple executives alike. We’ve been paying $.99 per song for the past few years just to get it onto our iPods. We want something different! (By we, I mean the law-abiding citizens who own iPods.) All that remains is the question of how is Apple going to organize this? That’s something I’ve been trying to find out. I am almost positive that whatever Apple decides to do will only be available with the purchase of a new iPod, a scheme that they have been using over the years to get you to pay more and upgrade.

• Option 1 - Unlimited Subscription Based w/Purchase of iPod.
  • How this would work is that when you go to buy an iPod, it will go for its regular retail price. However every month, an additional $XX will be tagged on to your bill, while songs themselves will be free to download. A recent statistic baffled me when it said that the average person with an iPod only buys 15 songs from iTunes in their lives. This would create an extremely large bond between bands/record labels, Apple, and the customer. This seems like a very good option for Apple, but the real question is whether customers would be up for it?
• Option 2 - Unlimited Downloads with the Added Price of iPods
  • How would this work? It’s very simple, when you go to buy an iPod the price will be increased by what I presume to be a three-digit number. With the iPod plugged into your computer, or maybe even with a retail code that you enter into iTunes instead of the Credit Card #, you can go to iTunes and download all the music you want onto your iPod. I don’t know about you, but I’d definitely be willing to pay an additional $200 for an iPod limited not by my budget (or willingness to break the law), but by the hard drive size of the iPod.

• Option 3 - Cheaper Songs from iTunes
  • When you enter a code that you would receive when you purchase an iPod (probably for an additional sum of money), the price of songs would go down from $.99 to a price determined by Apple. This would be nice because it could give people who don’t want to have unlimited music yet want to have more music an equal opportunity.

While nothing is definite about Apples tactics, it seems to me completely essential for their survival in the future.