Yahoo Music Unlimited takes on iTunes

Yesterday, Yahoo introduced the beta of their new Yahoo Music Unlimited service, a subscription-based music downloading service that costs $6.99/month (or $60/year). The service is currently available only to US-based customers. Yahoo takes square aim at the iTunes Music Store 70%+ marketshare by allowing users to play tunes from a catalog of more than one million songs,
transfer tracks to compatible portable devices (those that support Microsoft's Janus technology), and even share music libraries through Yahoo!
Messenger.

Yahoo is betting that music lovers would rather pay a flat subscription fee to "rent" unlimited tracks for the term of their subscription instead of buying them outright for $.99 a song. I'm not so sure they're right about that, and I suspect that existing iPod owners probably won't be rushing to buy a "compatible portable device" to replace their iPod so that they can listen to the Windows Media files that Yahoo offers on the go.

Some good may still come of this for Apple fans. If Yahoo's service is even remotely popular, it may cause Apple to rethink its pay-per-track strategy and start offering a subscription choice for the iTMS.

It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out, but I think Yahoo is a little late to the party.