Yahoo Music Service

The plot thickens. Yahoo has just launched their own online music service. It’s subscription-based like Napster and Rhapsody, so if you stop paying your monthly fee, all your songs turn into pumpkins. Napster and Rhapsody are both about $15/month and this is significantly cheaper at $7/month, or $5/month if you get an annual subscription. None of these services work with the iPod, or with Macs.

Strangely, Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow is already up on the Yahoo service, though Smoking Monkey is not. CDBaby doesn’t report sending either CD to them, so I wonder if they just piggybacked off some other service’s catalog. Or something.

It will be interesting to see if people prefer renting music to buying it. Personally I think it’ s important to own your music and be able to play it on any device you want, but $5/month is pretty cheap for unlimited listenings to any of a million songs. This could change the landscape completely. Anybody use and love/hate any of these subscription services?