Ian Rogers works on YME and tells you why you should use it. Ian used to work at Nullsoft, makers of WinAMP, the first MP3 player I can remember using in college. He’s much better at writing a compelling story for why you should use YME. I was convinced even before YME went public beta, now it’s your turn to be convinced.
Here’s food for thought. Not that you’d ever listen to all 1,000,000 songs in the collection, but if you were to buy 1,000,000 songs on iTunes it would cost you $1,000,000. In contrast, it would take subscribing to YME for 16,666 years to rack up $1,000,000 in costs. More realistic, for $60 on YME you could have access to more albums than any radio station keeps. For $60 on iTunes you get about 5 albums (assuming about 12 songs per album). You have to be really bad at math not to see that the iTunes model sucks. Additionally, you lease the music collection when you use YME. So if YME ever upgrades it’s collection to use a higher quality music codec, you can have that higher quality recording at no extra cost. Think you’ll get the same with iTunes?
Also, Apple’s been very protective of their music service, stomping out the likes of PyMusique for treading on their territory. YME has a plugin architecture that encourages you to tinker.
I believe what you said abouth the upgrading of music to higher quality is the real key factor for the music leasing. Already Itunes is talking about going to a higher VBR bit-rate encoding. So all my old Itune purchases will be obsolete. In the future using Yahoo, they may even have Lossless music files to download as part of the leasing, so everyone who subscribed would benefit with better quality.