To Yahoo! or not to Yahoo! The cost of switching

For me, subscription music services work. I started out with Pressplay in its early days and watched it remake itself as the new Napster. Last year I moved on to. As many of my friends know, I’ve recommended the service time and time again this past year.

I like to listen to a wide range of artists and genres. What grabs my attention one hour can be completely different from the next. New artists and discovering old classics are part of my listening habits. Last.fm lists a sampling of what the ears have heard recently.

Subscription services encourage sampling. It is the buffet mentality. Part all-you-can-eat and part “don’t be afraid to try something you’ve never had before or that a friend thought you might like”.

I’ve slowed my CD spending. Some of that can be attributed to using subscription services. The CD and vinyl collections take up a lot of space in the house – much to the chagrin of my better half. Digital storage makes it much easier to manage (hide) the size of the library. I do buy CDs that I really like – the collector habit can be hard to break. If a CD has copy-protection on it then I tend to shy away from buying it. Part of the reason for the purchase is the freedom and the sense of ownership. A copy-protected CD feels like I’m being punished for actually buying the music.

This week, Microsoft has released its new Windows Media Player 11 beta. A MTV/VH1/CMT powered service called URGE was also announced as part of the beta. Two of my machines now have WMP11 installed on them. I’ve given URGE a quick perusal and it looks fairly decent. The library UI and navagation in WMP11 is stellar.

And so my dilemna… do I make the switch from YME to URGE. I’m considering the following:

• My time – Do I want to start over given that I’ve invested a bunch of time creating playlists, ratings (3000+), downloading and bookmarking tracks.
• The community – the ever expanding Radish playlist collection, the ymusicblog hosted by Ian C. Rogers or product leads like Doug Clark stepping up to address user feedback make YME more than just a product you pay for. URGE has a bunch of celebrity playlists but for every Elvis Costello list that’s well thought through there is a lot of junk.
• The selection – it’s good but could be better. It has improved from a year ago and will continue to get better as more indie labels and artists come onboard. Catalogue is probably similar at both given they’re building on top of MusicNet’s base.
• Managing another music client – WMP11 interface feels more intuitive and is cleaner that YME. YME has better ripping options. The library sorting is better in WMP – for example, how it handles artists with “The” in the title. It’s really frustrating that YME re-writes “The Inbreds” as “Inbreds, The”. I’d really like to only have one client to manage. The integration within WMP11 of URGE is compelling.
• At work, at home, at the same time – YME will only let one PC be signed into the service at a time. This is a bit tough when I’m at the office and the kids are at the house and we both want to listen to tunes. Not sure if URGE is the same or not.
• Messenger integration and network sharing – YME has great sharing. I’ve listened to tracks from a friend’s PC who’s thousands of klicks away. MSN Messenger is my primary IM and so curious to see how they extended their integration. Big fan of the “I’m listening to” as I often discover bands that my old Hear Music brethen are now digging.

Either way I’ve got about two weeks to make up my mind. More later.

related articles

• Dang (December 18th, 2007)
• album of the day: Jonny Greenwood Is The Controller (August 21st, 2007)
• album of the day: Time On Earth (July 18th, 2007)
• album of the day: Jamaica to Toronto (Soul, Funk and Reggae 1967-1974) (June 26th, 2007)
• Over In About An Hour: Volume 8 (music for washing the dishes to) (June 12th, 2007)




This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Music, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.