Yahoo Music Unlimited

» see music.yahoo.com/unlimited as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

yahoo music unlimited never reached turkey in any meaningful way. it was a us-only subscription with drm-locked windows media files, the payment side wanted a us credit card. anybody in ankara who wanted yahoo music in 2006 either used the free yahoo launchcast streaming station or just downloaded mp3 files from limewire and called it a day. i had ttnet broadband by then, the second option was what everyone i knew did.

yahoo had bought musicmatch in september '04 for around $160 million, mostly to get the jukebox software and a paying subscriber pool. the music unlimited service launched on may 10 '05 at $4.99 a month, the catalog crossed one million tracks pretty quickly. the price kept being the headline.

the drm side of this was the part that did not age well. every track came down as a windows media file with license checks pointed at yahoo's servers. if you stopped subscribing the file stopped playing, and if yahoo stopped existing the file also stopped playing. by '08 yahoo had decided it did not want to be in subscription music. it sold the customer accounts to rhapsody in february then shut the doors on september 30.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

for about a year the $4.99 price tag was the only thing the press wanted to talk about. it was half of what rhapsody charged. napster had just rebranded as a paid service and was trying to charge similar money. yahoo basically dared everyone to undercut them, nobody did, because the math did not work even at the price yahoo was charging.

on paper the product was fine. the catalog was bigger than rhapsody's at launch and the musicmatch jukebox client was already on a lot of pcs from the late dot-com era when it was the default cd ripper. for the kind of person who already had musicmatch installed, music unlimited slotted in without much fuss. that group was smaller than yahoo hoped.

~ the unraveling ~

the price had to keep being cheaper than the cost of running the service to stay attractive. labels kept raising per-stream fees. the windows media drm was tied to the desktop, which meant you needed a portable device that supported plays-for-sure to take songs anywhere, and the ipod did not. so the person buying an ipod could not use yahoo music unlimited on it, and the person already buying drm-protected wma tracks was already locked out of the ipod ecosystem. in between those two the actual customer base was narrow.

itunes store was hitting full stride in 2006 with a la carte 99 cent downloads. spotify did not exist yet outside sweden. yahoo decided subscription music was not going to be its business, brad garlinghouse's famous peanut butter memo had already argued that yahoo was spread too thin. music unlimited was one of the brands quietly tagged for the exit.

~ the long tail ~

the rhapsody handoff in february '08 imported the customer accounts but not the catalogs in any clean way. people who had ripped their library through musicmatch were left with files that worked while the drm server was up, then stopped working when it went down. the same thing happened to walmart and msn music subscribers around the same time. it became the drm betrayal story everyone repeats now alongside divx-the-rental-disc, except people had paid more.

the spotify us launch arrived in july 2011, three years after yahoo had given up on the model. by then the catalog math had changed enough that all-you-can-stream was viable. yahoo music unlimited sits in the strange interval between pressplay and musicnet on one side and spotify on the other, the era where the labels and the technology companies both knew subscription was the future but neither could find a price that worked.

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