Following closely on the heels of new Napster and Rhapsody music service offerings, Yahoo! has unveiled Yahoo! Music Unlimited, an online music store with an all-you-can-download music rental plan (including loading songs onto select portable players). The public beta still has some rough edges (namely, slow navigation between screens and some minor visual glitches), but from what we've seen so far, YMU has done things right.

One of the big draws, at least initially, is the price. Buy a full year's subscription at the introductory offer (http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited) and you'll pay $59.88, which works out to $4.99 per month. By comparison, Rhapsody To Go is $13.32 per month with a year's subscription. Subscribing month-to-month costs $7.99, which is still much better than the $14.95 per month that Napster and Rhapsody charge. The company won't commit to how long this "introductory" offer will last, however.

To use YMU, you'll need to download the Yahoo! Music Engine, which provides access to the store as well as organizing, ripping, and burning tools. You'll also get Yahoo! Messenger, which is configured to launch automatically at startup. It ties in, since you can share music with friends who subscribe to the service.

YMU boasts a library of over one million tracks, which puts it on an equal footing with Napster, Rhapsody, and Apple's iTunes Music Store. We tested it against Napster by searching for the current top 20 albums on the Billboard chart, and found them roughly even (18 for YMU, 17 for Napster, including a few partial albums for both). But when we searched for the top 20 from Billboard's chart from 15 years ago, YMU was much stronger (14 for YMU, only 8 for Napster).