May I See Your License Please?

Posted by emayoh, November 3, 2006 at 12:55 am, in YMusicBlog General, Yahoo! Music Unlimited.

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

7 Comments »

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  1. Well, its clear that business model of pay and sync is more convenient for publisher and is cheaper for user. Yahoo Music beats even cheap Russian ROMS-backed music services like http://www.allofmp3.com or newborn http://www.mp3ninja.com with both QoS and price. But! I think you underestimate the power of tradition and habit. What Yahoo Music does is about changing habits. And it is difficult. Why can’t you keep at list part of the database available for traditional pay-per-download service with no special sotware for installation on user’s side?

    Comment by mahasvin — November 6, 2006 #

  2. I’m locked with you guys for two years so every improvement is a good one.

    Subscription services are so useful that the DRM on the music is the only way a record company can allow the service to exist.

    So the easier it is to use the DRM the better.

    Comment by resource — November 7, 2006 #

  3. Does this mean that when I transfer a new song to my device, all the licenses for all existing tracks on my device are refreshed for another 30 days?

    Comment by mylespapi — November 9, 2006 #

  4. I’m really glad this was fixed. It’s extremely frustrating to be 5 minutes into a 30-60 min drive and find that your tracks are expired a day or two after syncing.

    Comment by garfong — November 22, 2006 #

  5. great question mylespapi. any answer guys? just that track’s license or all licenses (like rhapsody does with the Sansa R)?

    Comment by buchananmb — December 8, 2006 #

  6. I wish this had been fixed before I bought a zen player, spent hours filling it for a trip to new zealand only to have it ‘de-register’ on day 3 of a 12 day trip.

    Comment by krup — January 17, 2007 #

  7. […] 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 […]Publ.Date : Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:55:17 +0000 […]

    Pingback by LyricalData — February 23, 2007 #

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