Music Subscription Services Reach for an Edge

Yahoo's Music Unlimited service ( http://music.yahoo.com/ ) is much simpler to understand: Pay $6.99 a month or $59.98 a year to listen to all the music you want and copy it to eligible Windows Media-compatible players. The same iRiver H10 worked just as well here.

Yahoo says more than a million tracks are available for rent. Songs available for purchase at 79 cents each (all but 85,000 of the for-rent tracks, plus 20,000 not offered on a subscription basis) are clearly labeled as such.

The usage permissions set in each download are looser than Rhapsody's, allowing a song to be played on any five computers at once, up from three, and any one playlist to be burned to an audio CD 10 times, up from five. As with Rhapsody, you can copy a download to as many music players as you want.

The Yahoo Music Engine software needed to browse and buy (Win 2000 or newer) throws in access to Yahoo's LaunchCast custom radio station. This provides more ways to define your tastes than Rhapsody's equivalent, but the software DJ behind it serves up too many obvious, overplayed hits.

You can fine-tune a LaunchCast station by rating each track played from one to five or blackballing it entirely, but a few days of this has yet to cut down on the boredom factor.

Yahoo Music also allows subscribers to play -- but not copy -- songs to each other over Yahoo's instant-messenger service. Chat partners who don't subscribe to Yahoo Music only get a 30-second snippet of each song.

But with the number of Yahoo Messenger users trailing behind those using the AOL and MSN IM networks, you may find few fellow listeners online. As if it's trying to reverse that, the Yahoo Music installer pushes you to switch a batch of Internet settings, such as your browser's start page and search engine, to Yahoo.

Yahoo's Music Engine software, notwithstanding its clean looks and generous feature set (you can copy CDs to your computer in almost every format in existence), shows its unfinished, beta-test status too often. It frequently coughs up error messages, incorrectly displays the usage rights of songs imported from an existing collection and presents one of the worst-organized help files around.

Even factoring in those defects, Yahoo's pricing is still enormously enticing. Rhapsody's brilliant custom-radio station and iPod compatibility may also lure some iTunes shoppers.

Apple seems to think that's not going to happen; its officials routinely say that nobody wants for a music-for-rent option. But if Yahoo or Rhapsody take off, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple come out with an "iRent" service of its own.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.