So I signed up for a free trial of Yahoo!’s unlimited music plan (YMU).  On the surface it’s a great deal; $5 a month for unlimited streaming music and $.79 per song you decide to buy.  That’s much better than the alternatives like Napster, and to top it off you can try it for 7 days for free.

I should have remembered that nothing in life is free.

To use the YMU service you have to download the Yahoo! Music Engine (YME), which I did last Friday  and then I used it for a day. I was offline all weekend, but when I booted up on Monday the YME wouldn’t load properly.  The program works with Internet Explorer (IE) so basically you have a YME interface around an IE browser window.  The problem was that whenever I tried to use YME I got an "Action Canceled" message in the IE part.  That meant I couldn’t get to the Yahoo! music site, which meant I couldn’t get my songs fed to my computer.

After many attempts I got it restarted and used it all day on Monday.  Yesterday when I booted back up I started getting these weird "Scripting Error" messages, so I uninstalled the YME and then reinstalled it.  I stopped getting the scripting error messages, but I did get the "Action Canceled" message again.

Somewhere along the line I emailed tech support, but a day later I had no response.  Of course there’s no phone number, not even for paying customers (Note: YME is free, but the unlimited service is not and I have to be able to use YME to utilize my paid service).

So I decided to go to Yahoo! groups and see if there’s a group dedicated to YME.  Lo’ and behold there is, and there’s a crapload of messages there (1135 total, 135 in just the last 7 days), and almost all deal with problems with the service.  To his credit there’s a guy named Ian from the YME development team who posts replies there regularly, but the level of problems they’re having with this thing is stunning.  I’ve posted message number 1131, and hopefully Ian will be able to help me.

What’s bugging me now is that I had to put one year of service on my credit card to get the 7 day trial.  While it was working the service was great and I’d like to keep it, but I’m truly irked that even as a paying customer I can’t get around their buggy "free" program. 

And now I can’t find a phone number or any other contact info for canceling the trial before the 7 days is up, which is the only way to keep from getting charged for the service.  I ran into a similar situation years ago with MSN and it literally took me over a year to get the problem solved with them.

I bet if Google had a music service it would actually work:)

If something positive happens I’ll let you know, but for today Yahoo! sucks.

***Update***

I received an email from Mal at Yahoo! Customer Care on Friday, August 26.  Unfortunately the fix he suggests is one that was already posted on the YME group message board, so I’m going to have to reply and let him know it didn’t work.  So I heard from them…three days later. 

I’ll let you know when all is resolved.