In my oh-so-timely ClicksToday newsletter that arrived hot and fresh with newsy Webbiness just now, I learned that Yahoo has just unveiled a great music download service along the same lines as Napster and Real Rhapsody. More from ClickNews:

"Yahoo officially launched their Music Unlimited music service today with a multimedia ad campaign called "This Is Huge" and it features a lot of music and the "Mini-Pop" stars that sing them.

The testing got started back on May 11th and Thursday the opened the service for nationwide usage. The price point comes in at $4.99 a month paid in one annual fee or $6.99 paid monthly. Major competitors like Napster and Real Rhapsody charge $9.95 a month for there services.

If you pay for the monthly fees, the songs are tethered, you can put them on your portable players and run with them as long as you have the service. If you want to keep the songs, regardless of the monthly fees, most services including iTunes run for 99 cents. Yahoo goes for 79 cents while you have the Music Unlimited service."

With the MTV movie awards at the end of August in Miami, Yahoo is planning a huge kickoff campaign, including "guerilla street teams to help educate consumers on the benefits of Yahoo! Music Unlimited."

More information from the Motley Fool (requires registration to access) states that "Subscription-downloaded tracks expire when your subscription expires. So to keep accessing your tracks, you need to pay the standard $0.99 a song and download it individually. And, after reading through much fine print, you realize that these songs are not compatable with the iPod because they are downloaded by Yahoo! in Windows Media Audio format."

What? No iPod? I was just at the Apple store this weekend drooling over iPods and since the big birthday is coming up here soon, I'm dropping heavy hints. If Yahoo really intends to compete in the digital download market they're going to have to include iPod-compatible offerings. However, since Yahoo is providing a huge variety of songs (over one million) at such a low monthly price, you can check them out relatively cheap and then decide later on if you want to purchase them. So that kind of makes up for the whole non-iPod stuff. Maybe. But I'm wondering what Yahoo marketing is thinking, exactly, since the main demographic they're targeting at the MTV Music awards with the crack teams of roving guerilla evangelists are exactly the ones who are buying all the iPods.

Related:

• Yahoo Local Search: The more I use this the more I like it. Last night we went to our local computer superstore to buy the sixth season of Simpson's and used Yahoo Local Search to find the nearest ice cream store. And I'm lovin' the wiki-style comments.
• Yahoo Reference Section: Yahoo has a ton of offerings that a lot of people just simply are not aware of, and their reference section is one of those; which is unfortunate since it's an excellent resource.