This is why unlimited music fails

I’m a diehard iTunes music store fan. I freely admit that I love it.

And, since I also love iTunes as a music player, and my iPod, it makes the whole “closed loop” thing work.

I don’t mind paying $9.99 for an album, when I can put it on my home computer, my work computer, my iPod, and burn a CD of the music for listening to in my car. It’s great.

However, for the past few months (based on some of the urging of previous AOL co-workers) I’ve been playing with the Yahoo! Music Engine (aptly called Y! Me). The draw is: for $7 bucks (or whatever it is) a month, I can listen to all the music I want. Any album, any time. As much as I want. Now, there’s some limitations here…

• The Y! Me? Player is absolutely atrocious. The UI for this thing is simply awful. I find myself cursing at it fairly often.
• The Y! Me? Player also takes up a tremendous amount of system resources (~80mb of memory). 80mb just for a music player?! Jesus, that’s just bloat.
• You can’t burn any of the music you download. If you want to burn something, you have to pay for it again, and the pricing varies. Nothing like the iTunes $.99 a song model. Which ultimately means no music in my car.
• Following along with that, all of the music is unplayable on both my powerbook and my iPod. And after dropping $300 on my iPod, I’m not about to go and buy another (sub-par) WMA music player.
• And finally, the obvious problem, the minute you stop paying the monthly fee, all of the music expires. It’s done. You got nothing.

But you know what? Even with all these things against it, I still managed to fight my way through the UI, and generally “deal” with it… Simply because having unlimited music was just such a hoot. Almost anything I could think of at my fingers. Unlimited listening. It was powerful. Awesome, even. Think of a band, and go download hours of music from them. That is, until today.

One of the albums I had been enjoying was Emiliana Torrini’s Fisherman’s Woman. This was one of the first albums I downloaded when trying out the service (I believe I heard about her on NPR or something). Now, at some point, this album would no longer play. I, at first chalked it up to a bug in the Y! Me? Player, and kept meaning to look into it. Click to play, and nothing, it would just zip right by.

So today, I decided to delete those tracks, and re-add them, only to find, much to my delight, that album is no longer available for download. Oh, it’s listed there, and I can purchase it, but I can’t listen to it, however would I like to listen to a 30 second clip?

Naturally, this led me to finding at least 6 other albums that I had previously downloaded that were also in this state. Wow, hey Yahoo, thanks for telling me.

Fuck that. This whole notion of renting music is pretty interesting, but with all the crap that you have to deal with, and to top it off with music that can be arbitrarily taken away without warning… it’s just too much. I’m going back to iTunes.