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Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It
iminplaya writes with a link to an excellent article at Ars Technica, extracting from it a few choice nuggets: "The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good — and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'... DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won't deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market? The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a 'privilege' to be monetized."
If you RTFA, you'll see that no one is losing access to their music, they just won't be able to transfer them to another computer without a workaround such as burning them to a CD. Annoying, yes, but not the end of the world.
Not that I'm all for DRM, this just isn't as big of a deal as the article makes it sound. This won't be the wake-up call that makes the average user see the evils of DRM, because most of them won't even notice.
Thank you very much for mentioning the Amazon MP3 store! :-)
In short, Amazon's MP3 store is the first truly viable alternative the iTunes Music Store for these these reasons:
1) The cost in many cases is much lower than iTMS on a per-song and per-album basis.
2) Amazon encodes their MP3's using the LAME 3.97 encoder with 256 kbps variable bit rate encoding, which results in excellent sound quality that is almost the same as the uncompressed CD original.
3) Because the MP3 files have no DRM restrictions, that means no hassles copying the music with third-party programs to your portable music player.
4) Amazon's MP3 downloader program automatically puts the playlist into either Windows Media Player 11.0 or iTunes, which means easy syncing with your favorite portable music player that uses these programs to copy music to your player.
It's small wonder why I've bought several albums through the Amazon MP3 store and are searching for more albums to download. That explains why older music stores that use DRM restrictions are rapidly falling by the wayside.
If you want to save your Yahoo! music, you can re-record it using two S/PDIF interfaces without losing any quality. There are no D/A conversions involved. You just need some decent recording software. Just tell Windows to use the S/PDIF as the default audio output device.
On Linux, I recommend Ardour for recording. www.ardour.org
On Windows, Audacity does a nice job.
Go to google.com, type "IANAL" into the little box...
No sig today...
But it's not really as bad as slashdot would have you believe. Yahoo music is a subscription service, mostly, so unless Yahoo plans to continually take your money after the servers are shut down, this is no problem. Sure, the people using it will be slightly inconvenienced, but there are other subscription services. No one on a subscription service should think they have any right to that music once they cancel the subscription, just as I don't have a right to the Howard Stern show after I cancel Sirius.
Furthermore, Yahoo Music's 0.99c songs are all, as far as I know, Non-drm'd MP3's. People that bought the songs should have no problem listening to them. DRM is really a non-issue here, as it doesn't affect anyone in a manner that they wouldn't expect.
I believe it all started as music match long long ago. A great service. Yahoo! purchased it and started messing around with the service making it a pile O' poo (breaking features for instance and not repairing them). The person(s) responsible for Music Match started another service: www.slacker.com which is quite nice, at least the web radio bit. I have yet to make use of any of their pay services.
Just a little FYI.
If anyone remembers this more clearly, please let me know.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
The article doesn't mention this- but Yahoo is migrating their users to Rhapsody. This includes their library. You will still have access to your songs, just through a different service. Not sure what will happen to purchased tracks- but I suspect they'll allow you to re-download through rhapsody.
Certainly not fixing the DRM issue, but, still an important detail.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I am/was a subscriber to the Yahoo Music Service. I loved it. I had extremely convenient access to almost everything. I no longer worried about what I owned and just focused on rating stuff.
I believe that the value for my money that I got for this service - even if it dies today - is much greater then with buying CD's or buying individual tracks from iTunes. I paid a reasonable amount of money ( $10 a month) for a great music experience.
Let's face it, all of this music is pretty crappy sound quality, so I don't want to buy tracks at $1 a pop that will be obsolete in 5 years when higher quality multi-track formats become available. The stuff from Yahoo is 192Kbps WMA which is reasonably good by today's standards but still pretty crappy.
And now that the service is going dark, everything is transferred to Rhapsody. I have 8 months remaining on my Yahoo account and they are transferring that 8 months to rhapsody, along with my music collection (if I want). So I do not loose the music as others seem to be implying. As before, I have to keep paying to keep my collection alive - that is the deal that I have agreed to.
BUT now the negative.
From the FAQ it appears that Yahoo is not going to transfer my music rating to the Rhapsody service. The music rating ARE my collection, so this really screws me up. If someone wrote an app that culled my rating from the Yahoo Music service I would be thrilled.
Rhapsody is Real. That sucks. I'm scared to install their application on my computer.
Rhapsody is only available in the US. Yahoo Music was available in other countries. What are the users in other countries supposed to do?
The MP3's on Amazon aren't DRM'ed. They're unprotected MP3s. Whether or not there is some form of watermarking included is another issue. So yeah, you pay your $0.99, download the file, and it's yours to enjoy as many times/wherever you like.
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