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July 25, 2008

music

Putting the “DRM” in “drama”: Yahoo! to shutter music, throw away keys

Posted Jul. 25, ’08, 9:24 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Music

billandtedkeys.jpgOh, DRM, when will you learn? As we heard earlier this year, Yahoo! Music, one of the first major music vendors to experiment with dropping DRM, will be shutting down their independent digital music service. And, worse it appears, they’ll be taking their DRM license servers offline as of September 30th. That means that all the music you bought (“you” generally, that is—we’re sure that “you” specifically were way too smart for that) from Yahoo! Music will be unplayable after that date.

A similar fate befell MSN Music when it went out of business, though Microsoft recently changed their tune and said they’d keep the lights on until 2011. And hence we see the problem with digital music subscriptions. Imagine if Target closed down, broke into your house, and took back all the CDs you bought there. That’d be awesome.

Of course, there are workarounds. For one, you can burn your tunes to a CD and re-rip them. That seems awfully counterproductive, doesn’t it? Isn’t the whole point of digital music the fact that you don’t have to waste all the physical resources? That’d be like getting electronic statement from your credit card company and laboriously hand-copying them, then scanning them back into your computer. Other alternatives include re-purchasing all your music in DRM-free format (I’m sure the record companies would love that) or just singing all your songs to yourself.

So what happens to Yahoo’s music offerings now that their in-house service is being shut down? Well, you’ll be able to sign up with a subscription service from Rhapsody instead. In other words: meet the new crap, same as the old crap. Yahoo Music’s Michael Spiegelman said on their blog that he was working to bring Rhapsody’s MP3 download store to Yahoo! Music customers too.

Death to DRM, we say!


1 Comments

Charles said:

This is actually why I have been extremely reticent to buy music, movies, or TV shows from iTunes. Sure, I buy songs now and again and the rare album, but most of the time I'll go over to Amazon if it's not available as an iTunes Plus track. And I've only bought three TV episodes and maybe about the same number of short films (which really are not available elsewhere).

Now, I know iTunes is doing well right now and no one is worried that their music libraries will be lost next week. But what about five years from now? I don't want to lose five years of music, movies, etc.

July 25, 2008 3:17 PM

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