I've been waiting a bit to compare the Napster and Yahoo portable music services.
I never wanted to be tied down to Itunes/Ipod and I bought a CreAtive Zen Micro a few days after Christmas. I guess I should review the Zen Micro at some point too!
Well after getting the Zen I signed up for the Napster2Go service and used that for about 4 months or so without any issues. The Napster2Go service runs $14.99 a month, and about two months ago Yahoo came out with its own service as well as a low low introductory price of $6.00 a month if I recall correctly. So at that point we switched to Yahoo, see both Destiny and I have our own Zen Micro's and we can share the service on each of our laptops, so the $3.00 each per month is like nothing as opposed to $7.50.
But enough of the backstory, on to the review--------
I prefer the Napster service hands down. They seem to have Yahoo beat in every area except for price.
The first would be artist availability. As of today Yahoo does not have Tsar's Band, Girls, Money available at all. I found that to be quite a buzzkill. I did listen to the debut album in its entirety for the first time and thought it was pretty damn good. Before doing this review I logged onto Napster for the first time in a few months, and of course they had Band, Girls, Money available for download. It seems all in all more music is available through Napster. Round One to Napster.
Ease of use and interface functionality also goes to Napster. How the hell can Napster have better search functions than Yahoo? Strange indeed. It is much easier to find what you are looking for on Napster. They have a clean interface that lets you find "new releases" as well as recently added tracks. Napster also has a function where you can search by Billboard 100 singles and albums for every year going back to the 1970's. Yahoo has nothing of the sort. Clicking through these Billboard menus on Napster is a great way to stumble across a whole bunch of those one hit wonders from back in the day. Yahoo has no sort of function that can hold a candle to this. Round Two to Napster.
Ease of download also goes to Napster. Using that Napster service you can just drag and drop your song onto your mp3 player icon. It is that simple. And you can download three tracks to your player at the same time. Pretty sweet right? Yahoo doesn't seem to think so. In order to get a track onto your player using the Yahoo service you must first download it to your "my music" folder. Then from your "my music" folder you drag and drop the song onto your device. And get this.... You can only upload one track at a time. So using Yahoo you have to move a track before you can upload it. Then you have to upload them one at a time. So in essence you can upload tracks six times faster using Napster. Round Three to Napster.
Price goes to Yahoo as their service is running either $6.00 or $6.99 a month while Napster2Go is $14.99 I believe.
Overall if the price even there would be no reason to choose Yahoo over Napster. Yahoo is still in beta mode at this point so hopefully they will be making some advancements in the coming months. But at this point if money is not an object I would say that Napster2Go slays Yahoo music.
In the interest of full disclosure I will state that I am a Napster shareholder, and I am still kicking myself in the ass for not buying shares of Yahoo for $9.00 a couple years back!
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