Yahoo Music Shutting Down

Yahoo Music Unlimited's days are numbered. Yahoo revealed yesterday that it will be shutting down it's subscription music service and in a deal with RealNetworks, switching its customers to the Rhapsody music service. Yahoo Music Unlimited had a compelling price point as low as $6/month for unlimited access to 2 million songs. Instead of buying each track of music, you could listen all you wanted on a subscription basis either on your PC or a compatible MP3 player. Under the Yahoo-RealNetworks partnership, subscribers to Yahoo Music Unlimited will be shifted to the Rhapsody service sometime in the first half of this year. Yahoo subscribers' music library and payment plans will remain the same for a limited time after the switch, but after that time, if you stay on Rhapsody you will be required to sign up at Rhapsody's rates, which start at $13/month, more than twice what Yahoo charged. Yahoo declines to say how many subscribers they have, my guess is probably not that many. They must not have been able to sustain their subscription model at the price points they were charging, making it too expensive to operate the service. Users that complete the switch to Rhapsody, be warned. Rhapsody is well known to be difficult to cancel, I know from personal experience.

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