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Yahoo Music Unlimited Beta Price: $6.99 a month or $59.88 a year; 79 cents a song to purchase
by John R. Quain 
If Rhapsody is like visiting your local music guru, Yahoo Music Unlimited is like shopping at Wal-Mart. There’s not much in the way of ambience, at least not in the beta version, but its sheer cheapness will likely win millions of converts.
Yahoo has generated a lot of buzz in the online music business by offering the lowest prices yet. At $6.99 per month (or $4.99 per month if you sign up for a year), this subscription service is half the price of the others, and individual tracks can be purchased at the bargain basement price of only 79 cents. However, according to sources at Yahoo, the monthly subscription price may go up after the beta period is over. Unfortunately, if early tests are any indication, Yahoo has a lot of technical issues to resolve before it catches up with Rhapsody and Napster. We were only able to test Yahoo in beta mode. However, the preview service was already accepting paying subscribers in spite of the fact that Yahoo had clearly not worked all the kinks out of its system. We attempted to register for the service on eight separate occasions, and were rebuffed by Yahoo’s music service each time. Eventually, we were able to log on and download the Yahoo Music Engine, an integrated application not unlike Napster’s and Rhapsody’s software. In terms of basic music offerings and selections, Yahoo is similar to the other two services. There are over 100 different Internet radio stations within the integrated Launchcast service, featuring hits from different decades and catering to particular musical palates, all based on your own ratings and feedback. However, in another sign of its beta status, the radio stations would not work with either Netscape or Firefox browsers. Yahoo did have a respectable selection of artists and music. Ironically, the service has limited search functions, offering only artist, album, and song title criteria; others search by keyword and composer. Nevertheless, we located our current musical obsession, The Arcade Fire, as well as some more obscure bands from our (admittedly idiosyncratic) musical past. Too bad our searches turned up more than a few listings for bands that Yahoo then informed us were not available for listening or purchase. Rather unhelpful in such situations, the service often told us that we could chat with fans of the unavailable artist even if we couldn’t listen to the music. There are better attempts at community within the service. Yahoo Music is integrated with Yahoo Messenger, which means you can see what people on your IM list are listening to and tune in when you want. Playlists or entire collections can be shared this way, but if you want more than 30-second clips, all participants have to be Yahoo Music subscribers. Two other features help Yahoo stand out from the crowd. The first is personalization. The service generates personalized homepages, as well as recommendations based on your tastes and the ratings of other subscribers. If you don’t feel like doing any research, try Instant Playlists, which add dozens of tracks to your library based on an artist you currently listen to. In its beta state, Yahoo is a little too frustrating for us to recommend to paying customers. On the bright side, the audio quality of tracks was comparable to Rhapsody’s (128 Kbps streaming; 192 Kbps for purchased songs), and Yahoo will overcome its growing pains. When it does, Yahoo Music Unlimited may be able to boast that it’s the least expensive of all the subscription services. If its price remains low, that fact alone may carry the day. music.yahoo.com/unlimited Featured Site Sponsors
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