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Yahoo! Music Going Dark, Taking Keys With It

Posted by timothy on from the myopia-!utopia dept.

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."

3 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Question! by neokushan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am not a Lawyer (And I refuse to say IANAL - it took me 3 months to figure out what that meant), so I'm curious as to what the legal implications are for downloading DRM free versions of songs you LEGALLY own (in one form or another)?
    I know that in the case of software, it's perfectly legal to download pirated versions providing you legitimately own it (ROMs in particular are a good example of this), but what about media?

    --
    +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  2. Why MSN Music store was going. by Kingston · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There is a good article here covering DRM issues and the decision, since revoked, to shut down the MSN music store licence server. It boils down to:

    So the trail leads back to the licence server - which Microsoft is turning off for its customers. Why is it doing that? According to Rob Bennett, who wrote the shock email, it was too complicated to support. "Every time there is an OS upgrade, you saw support issues. People would call in because they couldn't download licences. We had to write new code, new configurations each time,"

    So it was too much hassle to support, and as for the customers who had purchased music, they thought forever - they could take a running jump.

  3. Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music by Mascot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you want to save your Yahoo! music, you can re-record it using two S/PDIF interfaces without losing any quality.

    This is not something I have researched, so I'm making a good number of assumptions and qualified guesses here. I'm sure someone will set me straight if I'm way off.

    I may be missing something, but unless you can manage to get Windows to output the raw unencrypted data stream, I don't see how this would help any.

    In my experience Windows will take the audio and make a PCM stream out of it if you tell it to use S/PDIF as default device. Which means you end up with much the same as you would if you burned to CD and used that as a source for further processing. Either way, you end up having to add a lossy step somewhere along the way to make it practically useful.