Yahoo Introduces Competitor for iTunes 819
LadyDeath writes "After a year in development, Yahoo has launched its competitor to Apple's iTunes and Napster To Go, a subscription and download music service priced at only $4.99 per month. Tracks are offered in 192Kbps WMA, and can be transferred to portable devices. Perhaps most interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that the Yahoo! Music Engine is built on an open platform that facilitates plug-ins - both DLL and Web based. Podcasting and video playback plug-ins are already available." Update: 05/11 13:06 GMT by T : ian c rogers, formerly of Nullsoft, just led the build of the media player, and writes with information about "the the plugin architecture it supports as well as some of the 20 plugins that are already available for it.
I've posted my thoughts on why someone should or shouldn't use the Yahoo! Music Engine on my blog."
Re:Threat to iTunes? No way (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Threat to iTunes? No way (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh good, yet another (Score:5, Informative)
But, given how much market share the iPod (in all its incarnations) currently has, the prospect of being a Windows user with just a WMA player seems unlikely. If the iPod was just for the Mac, then yeah, you'd be right. But with the iPod also working with Windows, it gave the iPod the market share it now has... which is somewhere around 70%-75% or so of hard drive music players.
Sure, there's more "choice" for Windows users with the ability to buy multiple brands of players with WMA support... but this choice hasn't been cutting into the iPod's market share, or at least not in any noticeable way as of yet.
I don't have any sort of portable digital music player, but if I did, I'd get an iPod, and for various reasons. It's compact and easy to use; it has a decent battery life; and since I have a Mac, it can easily act as a FireWire external hard drive if I need it to. The music I have on my iBook is 4.59 GB... so I could get myself a 40 GB iPod and still have 35 GB of space for other things besides music. I could currently back up my entire hard drive's contents (music included) and still have almost 11 GB left over on a 40 GB iPod.
I can't think of any WMA players that would let me do that, or at least none that would let me do that easily.
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Because, as has been said a million times, there's nothing monopolistic about the iPod. You can play MP3s on the iPod JUST FINE. Don't sell WMA, and you'll be alright. And don't say that the RIAA won't allow it, because emusic.com has been selling non-DRM plain vanilla MP3s for some time now.
Re:Thanks, but no thanks (Score:5, Informative)
XSPF (Score:3, Informative)
See http://www.xspf.org/ [xspf.org]
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Apple has admitted, on several occasions, that they make very little money off of the iTunes music store. Their RIAA fees and operating costs eat up almost all of the 99 cents per song. The iTunes music store is nothing more than a way to sell iPods. (As an added bonus, iTunes introduces people to Apple's look-and-feel and creates a few more potential iMac buyers.)
If Apple let other companies license iPod-compatible DRM, they would not be abandoning a major revenue stream. And if the licensed songs still had to be transferred via iTunes, there would be no loss of side benefits either.
As long as iPod+iTMS is the popular choice, Apple sees no need to open their DRM. But I bet that they will cut licensing deals in a heartbeat if they start hemorrhaging market share.
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:4, Informative)
>store or portable-player company for any less than
>exorbitant fees?
Apple cannot license AAC, they don't own it. It's an open standard.
Apple does own the DRM scheme they apply on top of it.
But iPod's can play unprotected AAC's, too.
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:2, Informative)
no, Apple does not own fairplay, Veridsc does.
Yahoo doing copyright infringement? (Score:3, Informative)
about the use of his excellent pixel characters.
that they use in the header at: http://music.yahoo.com/musicengine [yahoo.com]
or more precisely: http://a1568.g.akamai.net/7/1568/1600/7a67bdc80db
well hopefully he got paid or something for it...
Bullocks. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's what Apple's FairPlay DRM means for users: any iPod can play any iTMS-purchased AAC, which implies there is a master key for decoding the FairPlay file. Apple's software respects the flags in the FairPlay file which indicate what computers are authorized to play the file. Other software may ignore the flags and decode the file anyway. You do need certain decryption keys to do this (see JHymn, PlayFair).
So the iPod will play any AAC file (protected or unprotected), any regular MP3 file, and any regular uncompressed PCM file. The only reason Real needs to jump through hoops is because they want their stupid DRM format to work.
Re:Call me crazy, but... (Score:4, Informative)
At least according to Wikipedia.
Re:I thought MP3 *is* supported (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You really shouldn't have to log into Yahoo... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.fistfulayen.com/ [fistfulayen.com]
ian
Re:So What! Nothing has really changed. (Score:4, Informative)
1) iTunes does not use 192kbps WMA. That's a minor nitpick, however.
2) allofmp3.com isn't really legal. Give the RIAA time, and they will figure out how to shut it down, even with Russia's uncooperative laws. Remember, last time they escaped merely on a legal technicality. They can't do that for ever...
Re:You really shouldn't have to log into Yahoo... (Score:2, Informative)
The plugins are quite a bit different from what was possible with Winamp. They're really meant to build services into the app, so they have access to the playlist engine, etc, rather than the audio stream.
To be honest I'm not sure how the price will change. If you buy at $4.99 for a year now, you're guaranteed a year at that price. Some outlets are reporting a likely surcharge for portability eventually. Not sure.
We're certainly not the fastest in every way, but with a well-written 6MB download-size, no MFC, ATL, or GDI+, we're not bloated, either. For an app that does what we do, the performance is quite good. For the most part we're bound by the network and the DLLs we work with, not the speed of the app.
ian
Re:Yahoo vs. Apple? (Score:2, Informative)
Well you'd say wrong [nasdaq.com]. As of writing this, Yahoo's market cap is around $47 billion, and Apple's is around $27 billion.
This difference in market cap is a result of the fact that Yahoo's profit has been growing far faster than Apple's, thanks to significantly higher margins, and the fact that Yahoo's current balance sheet shows a total equity of around $7 billion, compared to around $5 billion for Apple. Both companies have several billion in cash, cash equivalents and short term investments.
(Disclaimer: I own Yahoo stock)
Re:DRM (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't account for inflation over those 80 years, nor the price hike that happens about a year from now because Yahoo Music can't get enough subscribers to justify the low price of the service.
Every time they add another 100 CDs to the library, it's like you got them for free.
Yep, a whole $5 a month worth of free.
Who cares if it's DRM'd, as long as you can listen to what you want when you want.
Exactly! So what if you're forced to use Microsoft certified hardware and Microsoft certified software? So what if you decide to switch to another service that all your music, even the music on your portable device, gets automatically deleted thanks to the Microsoft Janus DRM? So what if you get tied into the service just to keep your existing music working, even though you don't usually listen to new music and download maybe only one or two new songs every month (like, in fact, most people over the age of 25 do according to the most recent polls).
The only major downside of DRM, if it's unobtrusive enough, is that you can't give away the music to others.
Yeah. I mean, who needs to share their interests with their friends anyway?
And while the music is lossy, 192k WMA is like 384k MP3 - which doesn't even exist, since 320k is the maximum quality (at least on any software I know of)
a) 384 kbps MP3 does exist. It's called "freeformat" and MP3 can go up to 640kbps.
b) 192k WMA is closer to 160k MP3, if you're using the proper encoders (read: LAME).
Re:Oh good, yet another (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bandwagon, much? (Score:3, Informative)
So about the only 'catch' is that the artists get paid essentially nothing because of a bug in Russian law. If the bug were fixed the price would obviously go up a bit, but MP3 sales would still be perfectly legal without needing to bow down to RIAA restrictions.
The reason all the other sites are essentially a uniform buck and impose essentially uniform and opressive DRM terms is that the RIAA members conspired with each other to exclude price competition and to exclude format competition and to exclude DRM terms competition. In other words it's a cartel conspiring to abuse their monopoly power to suppress competition and abuse their copyrights to control formats and playback devices. All things that would/should ordinarily warrant a big fat smack down by the DOJ for multiple flagrant antitrust violations. By the way, congress was floating a bill to exempt the MPAA and RIAA from prosecution for violating antitrust law, and Orrin Hatch was a huge supporter of the bill (or possibly even its sponsor) and he's currently head of the copyright law committee. So you know that if any antitrust prosecution were started against the RIAA that that bill would be whipped out and hit the floor faster than you can say 'corporate shill'.
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Re:Oh good, yet another (Score:3, Informative)
The article suggested that $5/month was an introductory price for the first year. After that it will probably go up to $10-12 bucks.