Nothing But the Stats

Greetings and Happy Thanksgiving, you pilgrims of pleasure, James the Yahoo Butler here, to titivate your ears and whet your appetite for morsels musical with a cornucopia (Not a “platter-ful” of new music because music’s not on records anymore) of new releases to get you dancing so you can not only express your personal creed of freedom, beauty, and truth through various gyrations of your hip region but also burn off the five pounds you’ll gain from Thursday noon until next Sunday’s bedtime.

While you munch on that drumstick, dish up that final serving of stuffing, and pluck the wishbone hoping for a Playstation 3, please note that in both tracks available categories for NR 11/14/06 Yahoo doesn’t fare as well as iTunes and Rhapsody. Doesn’t even come close. Why? One missing album had 60 songs on it; that skewered the stats vis-à-vis Us and Them.

Remember that scene early on in Brideshead Revisited, when Sebastian yacks in Charles’s ground floor window? The apology by way of explanation one of Sebastian’s chums offered sums up the Butler’s theory on explanations.

“The wines were too various. It was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of the matter. To understand all is to forgive all.”

To understand all is to forgive all, indeed.

New Releases November 14, 2006

Of the 16 albums tracked:
Downloadable albums: Yahoo 13 (81%), iTunes 14 (88%).
Downloadable tracks: Yahoo 174 (67%), iTunes 247 (95%).
Tracks-on-Demand albums: Yahoo 11 (69%), Rhapsody 13 (81%)
TOD tracks: Yahoo 162 (62%), Rhapsody 174 (67%).

Here’s the link to the playlist.

New Releases November 7, 2006

Of the 16 albums tracked:
Downloadable albums: Yahoo 12 (92%), iTunes 12 (92%).
Downloadable tracks: Yahoo 166 (92%), iTunes 170 (94%).
Tracks-on-Demand albums: Yahoo 11 (85%), Rhapsody 11 (85%)
TOD tracks: Yahoo 146 (81%), Rhapsody 156 (86%).

Here’s a link to the playlist.

Of the 200 albums tracked:
Downloadable albums: Yahoo 165 (83%), iTunes 182 (91%).
Downloadable tracks: Yahoo 2094 (85%), iTunes 2314 (94%).
Tracks-on-Demand albums: Yahoo 159 (80%), Rhapsody 157 (79%)
TOD tracks: Yahoo 2027 (82%), Rhapsody 1978 (80%).

Here’s a link to the BB50 Playlist.

May I See Your License Please?

One of the great things about portable subscriptions like Yahoo! Music Unlimited To Go is the ability to put subscription music on your MP3 player. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a few extra Gs laying around to fill my portable.One of the frustrating things about those subscriptions is that this technology is still relatively new, and there are some kinks that pop up now and then.

We recently knocked out one of those problems. When you transfer a song to your MP3 player, that player needs to be sync’ed up to your PC once a month to ensure your subscription is still active. The problem was that sometimes that sync would be required only a few days after you transferred the song, so it was becoming unplayable much faster than you’d expect. That wasn’t a great experience for sure. A few weeks ago, we were able to reconfigure the process so that when you transfer songs to your MP3 player, it always gets the freshest license available. This means more play time for your music and less hassle with syncing.

Subscription music isn’t for everyone, but hopefully it just got easier for a lot of people. Stay tuned for more improvements – we’re still hard at work!

Mick O.
YMJ Product Manager

Nothing But The Stats

Greetings and Happy Halloween you wiki witches and gigabyte goblins and bandwidth black cats, James the Yahoo Butler here, to treat – he would never deign to trick – you to a pillowcase full of slick-wrapped, sweet-tasting, much-anticipated candies. A Yahoo Sampler, if you will. You can even bob for a few Apples, if you so desire.

Of course, back across the Atlantic Ocean we celebrate Guy Fawkes Day during which time we mill about commons and ogle and gape at bonfires, but I don’t want to put any ideas in your innocent little heads. It’s a Santa Ana condition, you know.

Incidentally, by the by, the Butler is a huge fan of nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s adage “Never complain, never explain.” But mention must be made of the incontrovertible fact that Apple juiced us the past couple of weeks.
 

Why? Technical difficulties beyond the Butler’s ken. Something about a broken feed, a required hack, some skewed statistical reporting since remedied. Et cetera, et cetera. We now have the songs Apple had that we didn’t at the time of the check. Parity with Apple, get it? Stay tuned for the next couple of New Releases. We’ll be back on track. The fast track. We’ll strudel them.
 

New Releases October 17, 2006 

Of the 30 albums tracked:

• Downloadable albums: Yahoo 20 (67%), iTunes 29 (97%).
• Downloadable tracks: Yahoo 358 (88%), iTunes 409 (100%).
• Tracks-on-Demand albums: Yahoo 24 (80%), Rhapsody 25 (83%)
• TOD tracks: Yahoo 368 (90%), Rhapsody 349 (86%).

Here’s a link to the playlist.

New Releases October 24, 2006

Of the 20 albums tracked:

• Downloadable albums: Yahoo 16 (80%), iTunes 16 (80%).
• Downloadable tracks: Yahoo 217 (85%), iTunes 225 (88%).
• Tracks-on-Demand albums: Yahoo 12 (60%), Rhapsody 13 (65%)
• TOD tracks: Yahoo 165 (65%), Rhapsody 185 (75%).

Here’s a link to a playlist.

Billboard 200 October 28, 2006

 Of the 200 albums tracked:

• Downloadable albums: Yahoo 176 (88%), iTunes 188 (94%).
• Downloadable tracks: Yahoo 2538 (88%), iTunes 409 (100%).
• Tracks-on-Demand albums: Yahoo 147 (74%), Rhapsody 154 (77%)
• TOD tracks: Yahoo 2447 (86%), Rhapsody 2423 (85%).

Here’s a link to the playlist.