I recently signed up for the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service with great anticipation. I've been actively using MusicMatch for a couple of years and have loved their On Demand service that allows you to listen to any artist, any album, any song, etc. whenever you want, for a flat monthly fee of $6.95. However, this service (as of yet) does not allow you to transfer and listen to these songs on any portable device. Nonetheless, I was very excited to finally move to this model, but my excitement quickly turned to dismay when I tried to get this to work as advertised.
The first issue I had was the discovery that this service was not compatible with my old Dell Jukebox, and apparently Dell has no plans to upgrade their old device, which at least appears to be a potential ploy to force one to upgrade to one of their new products (which I did by purchasing the Dell DJ30). Given that I could sell my old Jukebox on eBay for about $150, this was not a huge purchase, especially given that this new DJ has a smaller form-factor and has 30 GB of storage.
When my DJ30 arrived, I then discovered that to use it with Yahoo's service, I'd have to download and install new firmware (despite that Yahoo! itself is promoting these Dell devices within the Music Engine as "Recommended Devices"!). Having upgraded the firmware previously on my wireless router, I was somewhat familiar with this process. However, I can't even begin to imagine how someone that is more of a general tech user would (a) know what firmware is, and (b) know how to download and install it. This would appear to be a major strike against both Yahoo and Dell in trying to get users to upgrade to this service (at least without giving them reason to get upset).
Having completed the firmware upgrade, I discovered that only one of my two WinXP computers can now "see" the device. No amount of fiddling has yet made the new DJ appear on my laptop. Dell actually sent me out a replacement DJ saying this was likely the problem (which it was not) and as of yet I'm not ready to spend hours on the phone with tech support to try and solve this issue.
I went forward and downloaded a bunch of songs and albums on the Yahoo! service, finally ready to port them to my Jukebox. Little did I know that this was going to be another huge time-consuming effort. I spent hours and hours messing with this thing, and reading online forums and blog postings of other users who have had similar issues with these products/services.
Yesterday, I finally got it working, by using Windows Media Player v.10 to transfer the tracks to my device vs. the Yahoo! service (makes sense right?). However, several postings on the boards indicate that this may only work for a short time and then stop again, so I'm a bit weary (yet still hopeful as I'm a pretty optimistic person).
Bottom Line: None of the following products/services are ready for prime-time: Yahoo! Music Unlimited, the Dell DJ products (for use with Yahoo! Music Unlimited), and Microsoft's DRM software (which is ironically called "Plays for Sure").
Having had great experiences with other Yahoo! products, I am a bit surprised that they rushed to put out a product (even in beta) that is so far from being user friendly. Om Malik previously speculated a bit on why Yahoo! moved so quickly to get this service to market, and it seems that if you are Yahoo! there are some benefits to this strategy. However, by turning off many early adopters who are struggling to make this work (and who in turn are telling others that it does not do so as advertised) seems like a poor decision. And obviously, this does not reflect all that well on Dell or Microsoft either.
