Can Yahoo’s New Music Service Earn a Profit?
Decisions, decisions, decisions! I just decided to subscribe to one of these music download services and had decided to try the new Raphsody service. But now here comes Yahoo, and the price seems right. Besides pricing, what should a consumer look for when choosing a music downoad service?
Yahoo’s Music Unlimited service, which became available yesterday, allows subscribers to retrieve songs from its catalog of more than a million tracks and listen to them on portable music players or on personal computers. The songs become unplayable if a user’s subscription expires.
A user who wants to copy a song onto a CD and own it will have to pay an additional fee per song.
The service will charge users $6.99 if bought monthly. If a user pays for a yearly subscription, the cost will be $4.99 a month, or about $60 a year, which is about a third the cost of similar services from Napster and RealNetworks. Both of those companies charge $14.95 a month, or almost $180 annually for features similar to the Yahoo plan.
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