So I'm really digging the new Yahoo subscription music service. It didn't appeal to me at $15/month for Napster but $5/month to listen to all the music I want encoded with WMA at 192 is a good deal to me. The client software is surprisingly good for a 1.0 product. The best feature is the recommendations of new music based on your ratings. You can make a personal "radio station" that can be narrowed by genre and has a user selectable mix of rated vs. unrated music. The selection of non mainstream music is surprisingly good.

I know a lot of people don't like this DRM model but I think it's great. This is a way to use the technology that wasn't possible before. I have little interest in the iTunes model where I pay $10 an album and still don't really own it.

The problem is I'm a recent Mac convert. My personal machine is a Powerbook, I use make regular use of an iPod and Airport Express. That means I'm limited to using the Yahoo service at the office. I'd love to see Apple offer a subscription service.