Dancing About Architecture

Okay, after a week of using Yahoo! Music Engine Unlimited, here's my summary: I'm in! I'm going to really enjoy this service, and it's already changed the way I think about music. Here are some quick thoughts.

Music Selection
I've generally been happy with the music selection, especially with new releases. So, while I haven't found:

• Stars
• Spoon
• Mogwai
• Lou Barlow
• Styrofoam

• Braid, Frame and Canvas
• Eels, Blinking Lights And Other Revelations
• Gary Jules, Trading Snakeoil For Wolftickets (minus Mad World, unfortunatley)
• Incubus, A Crow Left Of The Murder
• Joseph Arthur, Our Shadows Will Remain
• Kaiser Chiefs, Employment
• Nine Inch Nails, With Teeth
• Royksopp, Melody AM
• Ryan Adams, Cold Roses
• System Of A Down, Mezmerize
• The Chemical Brothers, Push The Button
• Tricky, Maxinquaye
• Some live albums from Bjork that I didn't even know existed

Radio
When I first checked out the radio feature, the sound quality was horrible. But now it's just as good as all the other music (which is very good), so I don't know what was up with that. Maybe it's because I'm an Unlimited subscriber now or something. Anyway, the personalized radio works great, although it was a little kludgy accessing my station on different machines: I thought at first it didn't keep that information server-side, but once I messed around with the client it eventually located my server-side profile.

MyStation is a great way to slowly crawl your way to new music, and you can see the immediate benefits of rating musical artists as you go. When it plays a song, it tells you why it's playing the song ("Audioslave, Recommended by fans of Incubus"), and you can easily jump to the artist to play their music.

All in all, I really like the radio feature and I imagine this will become my new "Party Shuffle" -- why shuffle with just your own music?

Here's a link to my station: eric_lunt's Station.

The Player
The player is fine. Not great, but not bad. Certainly no worse than iTunes. It's annoying that it keeps trying to push Y! Messenger on me, and I've had to restart the client a few times, but the fact that it's a plug-in based client is promising. I'm sure the client will improve over time.

One thing I really miss is that there doesn't seem to be much of a sense of a "queue", so when I come across something that I want to listen to later, I have resorted to adding it to a "Listen Later" playlist.

And yes, the mini-mode sucks, but that's supposedly addressed by a plug-in I haven't installed yet.

DRM
So, is the music rental model really viable? For me, the answer is "for the right price, you bet!". Everything has a price, and for $4.99/mo I'm willing to endure quite a bit of inconvenience. And truthfully, it's really not bad. You can have your account active on up to three machines, it works great disconnected, and it's all handled invisibly by the client.

So, I'm sold. So much so that I'm now thinking about mothballing my iPod and looking for a "PlaysForSure" portable player that doesn't suck. Anyone have any suggestions? Also, I'd love to have this music work with my tried and true (maybe that should be "tired" and true at this point) Audtiotron, but I don't think that's in the cards. Guess I'll have to buy-in 100% and get a Windows Media Center machine.

Nice job, Yahoo! And Microsoft: you somehow got me to buy into your evil empire. I feel dirty, but I'll be enjoying lots of great music.