in the online music space. Yahoo announced an online subscription music service priced at $6.99/month for access to over a million songs, including the capacity to download to portable devices (as long as the subscription is maintained).

This considerably undercuts current prices of other subscription services, and pressures Apple, which offers downloads at $0.99 per track, but no subscription service. (But Apple's library exceeds 1.5 million songs, says today's WSJ (subscription required).)

The service will work with 10 different portables, all of which use WMA format. It will not work with iPod.