Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Yahoo Music Engine vs iTunes

I signed up for the Yahoo Music Service. Here are the pros and cons as I see it compared to iTunes:

Pros:
  • $60/year for unlimited access to 1M songs.
  • Better than expected selection (lots of latin/trance, but so so on the international side)
  • Netflix-like collaborative filtering lets you quickly find similar artists, create playlists, etc. You can also have your suggestions be influenced by friends.
  • .79 a song for MP3s (iTunes is .99)
Cons:
  • iPod does not play WMA -- enough said!
  • Buggy Client
    • I had several crashes today
    • Sometimes it forgets that I'm a paid customer and only plays 30s
    • It does not automatically retry failed downloads
  • I really wish they had a Google-like 'do you mean ...?' when I mispell. Please don't make me spell correctly.
  • Bad search UI. It forces me to do query-by-example searches (i.e. by artist, title, etc) instead of flexible keyword searches. And it would be killer to have lyrics search.
  • No client for my Powerbook
  • iTunes is a sexier app
If Apple had the same subscription style service, I'd be willing to pay 2-3x Yahoo just to listen to everything on an iPod. But for now, I have decided to listen to the WMA's when I'm around a computer with broadband, which nearly most of the time.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

they should improve it in some aspects

2:53 PM  

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