Yahoo strikes at Apple's core / Internet giant will offer bargain online music subscriptions, 79-cent downloads

Yahoo strikes at Apple's core / Internet giant will offer bargain online music subscriptions, 79-cent downloads - Also, this is THE front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle today. While Rhapsody reintroduction seemed to get a collective yawn, all of the editorial I've seen today say that Yahoo is now instantly the biggest threat to Apple. Interestingly enough the Chronicle article seems to carefully state Yahoo's "introductory" subscription fee of $60/year. Perhaps Yahoo feels that once you've downloaded a year's worth of songs, you are essentially locked in to their service. To churn off to a competitor would require the users to re-download all of their content. At $200 million profit/quarter they can probably afford to take a short term hit in order to secure their position long term. As an added bonus, they can use this to get more (formerly) free service users to pony up their credit card info and subsquently lower the hurdle for Yahoo to upsell them on other premium services in the future.