Yahoo doubles price of online music

FACED WITH stiff competition from Apple's comparatively cheap iTune's offering, the search engine outfit Yahoo has decided to increase the cost of its service.

Yahoo has been running a promotion where it offered downloaders a price that was below Apple's in a bid to lure punters away from the service.

Now that has not worked, a spokesYahoo said that it will end the promotion and go back to its old price structure. This effectively doubles the price of Yahoos online music subscription service.

Yahoo will charge about $120 annually for access via download to more than 1 million songs that can then be transferred to portable players.

The downside is that if you cancel your subscription you automatically lose any rights to music that you have downloaded and it will not run with the iPod.

So you have a product that costs twice as much as the opposition, doesn't run on the most popular MP3 players and locks you in or lose all your content.

Sounds like a Microsoft strategy and should be a real winner. µ

More here [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051027/ap_on_hi_te/techbits_yahoo_music;_ylt=ArqBa1jQ5mAEnBcLmmn8bMWs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3cjE0b2MwBHNlYwM3Mzg-]