January 14th, 2006
Could Yahoo Music become Apple iPod's Achilles's heel?
I hate my CDs. I hate them because they take up several large boxes and they follow me from apartment to apartment.
I ripped some of them onto my hard drive–but my jukebox is scattered across several laptops from different eras of my life. I’ve never been able to find the time to consolidate and organize my music collections.
I hate my CDs even more now. I bought a year subscription to Yahoo Music just before the holidays and for $5 per month I have access to an amazing amount of music streamed into my hifi.
A friend came over and we were listening to bands from when we were both in London in the early 1980s. I might have been able to find some of that music in my boxes of CDs, but probably not, because the CD wouldn’t be in the right case. Yet on Yahoo Music it took just a few clicks.
And exploring new music is easy through its recommendation engine. Yes, it is a bit slow in bringing up playlists and biographies and such. And its recommendations are clunky, but that stuff will improve.
Also, this is incredibly disruptive to FM music radio. I was listening to one of my favorite FM music stations but some of the advertising became incredibly annoying and I had to switch it off. I went to the radio station’s website, looked at its current playlist and clicked it into Yahoo Music. Music w/o annoying advertising for $5/month. . . priceless.
And because it is a web service, I can access it from any computer. I can access it from your home, which makes for a brilliant sales strategy.
You can even load music onto a portable MP3 player–except for an Apple iPod. And that is why I am giving up my Apple iPod. Apple won’t allow Yahoo Music onto iPod because it has its iTunes store to protect.
If I were trying to unseat Apple’s iPod iron grip on the industry I would ban iPod from Yahoo Music and only allow it on my player(s).
I give Yahoo Music 8 from 10 clicks in my consumer web services category.
(8 from 10 = 2 - the smaller number of clicks the better :-)
Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media. He also writes at Silicon Valley Watcher. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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