Ah, another chapter in the “DRM Sucks” book. Microsoft, now all but finished screwing over its music customers (and no, I don’t mean with the very invention of the Zune – ZING!) with the fact that the Zune is crippled from a music sharing perspective and doesn’t support their own PlaysForSure DRM, has now announced that their old MSN Music service – the one that they’d rather scrap entirely instead of roll into the Zune Marketplace, is going away.
It was bad enough when MSN Music purchasers, whose music was loaded down with PlaysForSure, discovered that they couldn’t copy that music up to their shiny new brown Zune, and that they’d be out in the cold there. Now, the license servers that allow them to authorize computers to play the music they paid for are going under as well, which means that MSN Music owners will never be able to authorize another computer to play their DRM-ridden tunes again.
If they get a new PC and try to copy their music over to it? No dice.
If they upgrade their system to Vista from Windows XP? Nope, sorry.
If they have to replace the hard drive and copy data in from backups, or reinstall from scratch? Nuh uh.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in the “iTunes is king” camp, and although I love the iPod, I think the closed Apple-to-Apple system of content purchasing is a little outmoded. I also don’t particularly care for Apple’s DRM, although they don’t particularly make it hard for you to remove. (Fact of the matter is, with any kind of DRM, no matter who the company is, if you, a music owner, have DRM protected music or movies, you can find yourself in this situation.) At the same time though, this is inexcusable. Microsoft is essentially telling their customers, “Thanks so much for all the money, sorry about loading you up with files you won’t be able to use, but hey, there’s always Zune Marketplace, where you can do this all again!”
No thanks. Complaints about the Zune aside (that article is a trip to read, by the way), this is kind of sad. If it bodes well for MSN Music owners, maybe Microsoft will compensate them somehow (although sadly I don’t hope it’s with more DRM-ridden music or discounts for it) or give them a way to unlock their music in the future (maybe free equal downloads from Zune Marketplace so they have updated copies with license servers that will hopefully be around at least a little while). In the end though, it’s just another reverberation of the deathknell for DRM. Most major labels are signed on to sell their tunes without it; you can even buy non-DRM tracks from iTunes. There’s no real excuse for the public to subsidize crippled media markets by buying protected audio anymore.
[ AppScout :: Customer Service 101: Microsoft Deletes MSN Music Servers ]
[ BoingBoing :: MSN Music Customers Lose *All* Their Music the Next Time They Buy A New PC ]