Jeez ... They do that to me over and over again: I keep telling myself "Come on, Steffest, Yahoo is a big company, this must be for a reason, surely there must be some qaulity service there ..." and I speed off trying to find this great quality.
Do you think I ever find it? nope - not yet anyway ...
This time its the Yahoo Music Jukebox ...
People who know me know also that I'm a very big fan of MusicMatch. From version 1 and onwards - they got it right - and I was willing to pay for their excellent services and products.

Then they got bought by Yahoo!

Hmm - not good, but well, allthough there would not be any new developments on MusicMatch, the existing services stayed in the air, so no big deal, right?
Not so anymore: This week I got a message that the MusicMatch services would stop at the end of august and that I had to move to Yahoo Music Jukebox, which, offcourse, was all for the better because they had twice the numbers of songs available etc etc etc .. blablabla.

So I installed Yahoo Music Jukebox and transfered my account.

I'm not happy

Yahoo Music Jukebox simply sucks ...
Here's the rant

OK - its true that they have more songs available that MusicMatch did, but they are all the wrond kind of songs for me: all generic American.
When I typed a Dutch artits in MusicMatch, it didn't have the tracks, but it did show some meaningfull info - pictures - bio and it could offer me a playlist with similar songs.
MusicMatch was filled with crosslinks in the Bio and Radio pages that made it super-easy to explore new artist and refine your music-preference. Now, you get redirected outside the program to some other yahoo musicservice which slows down the exploring and takes away all the fun because you end up with a dozen different services and windows that don't work together that well.

En fin ... I shall stop the rant here, but I could on and on: the interface sucks, no skins, no working podcast support, crashes frequently ... (and I'm not the only one there)

Like everything in Yahoo, its just clutched together, bloated,full with links to services that are moved or stopped working so that you constantly hit a dead end, making the overal experience simply awfull ...
The developers love for the product that was noticable in MusicMatch has no way of surving in a company like Yahoo.

Its things like this that makes rethink my Apple-dislike :-) Perhaps I should give the Apple-approach some more credit.

All in all - things like this confirm again that - in my opinion - Yahoo is in big trouble.
Internet-users mature very fast and will start to expect quality.
Yahoo offers more services then any other company, but none of them are very good.

If they don't get their act together they will be gone in 5-10 years time.

In the meantime - I'm a bit stuck with Yahoo Music Jukebox ... time to look for some alternatives.