Yahoo!Unlimited Wins Battle of the Music Services
Rhapsody has been the best thing that has happened to my music listening habits since Napster and when I first installed it, my friends got tired of my wide-eyed Rhapsody evangelism. But a couple years later, Rhapsody finally released an update and it was a couple steps backwards instead of forwards, correcting almost none of the issues I had and adding new problems that made the upgrade unusable and undesirable for me. Thanks to a comment by Michael Scott Fischer on my Rhapsody Becomes Napster post, I was able to uninstall that piece and reinstall the old, dusty version I loved so much.
But returning to the old version make the issues I have with that version stand out even more. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that Rhapsody had forsaken me, had no clue, or both. And so, the honeymoon ended. And less than 2 weeks later, Yahoo!Unlimited music service was released. There are several reasons why Y!U is now my music service of choice and Rhapsody is gone:
- I’ve been a member of Launch since long before Y! bought it Y!U is tightly integrated with Launch, so the utterly ridiculous amounts of ratings I’ve made over the last 6 years are still there and I basically have Launch on steriods + all of Rhapsody’s features
- The $6.99/month is a better deal than Rhapsody (and it is even less if you pay annually). The lower price is an introductory price, only good for the first year, but that gives Rhapsody a year to wake up and smell the competition.
- IM integration and pretty much every other feature imaginable is either available now or will be soon thanks to Y!U’s API. What this means is that if I say “damn, I wish I could make my current playlist always update the [non-existant] ‘now playing’ sidebar on my website”, I can actually make it happen. This feature, above anything else, is a huge indication that Yahoo! has a clue, cares, or both.
- Sticky Fingers is available in full on Y!U instead of the 30 second clips that Rhapsody offers for all but one song of what I could reasonbly argue is the greatest rock n roll album ever recorded. Even if Y!U wasn’t as good as Rhapsody (it is) and wasn’t cheaper (it is), this album would be enough to make me switch. Sad but true.
So I am now a proud member of Yahoo!Unlimited. Feel free to look me up, I’m on Y! as “sothym” (long and lame story behind the name, don’t bother asking, it isn’t worth your time).
Tags: Music