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."

Comments

People are still buying DRMd music.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'

Unbelievably, the follow up to that from many slashdotters will be: "My music store will never go offline." Unbelievably, people are still buying (and defending) DRMd music.

If this story (and the MS one before) doesn't alert you to the sad fact that you don't own any DRMd music you've bought, nothing will.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[somersault]

Are you kidding? I wouldn't have thought that slashdotters would go for DRMed music. I did buy a couple of albums from iTunes as a test, one ended up being DRMed and the other wasn't - I just burned it to CD and ripped it again. I know I'll have lost some quality, but if I ever use iTunes again I'm going to make sure the songs are 'iTunes plus'.

most DRM is broken

s/most/all/

If you can listen to it, you can record it. That will always be true. DRM for music and video is a completely broken concept.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Chrismith]

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.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[dwandy]

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.

There is a loss of quality and meta-data when you do this. Of course it's not actually the end of the "world" but it is the end of the music (at specified quality & features) that you paid for. So pretty much it is the end of the world (for your purchase).

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.

This is only true because on the Dark Day it's unlikely that even an insignificant number of the customer will want to move their music to a new computer. There won't be a wake-up call, because it will only be as people replace their old computers or want to move it to another device that they will realise they've been screwed. That doesn't make Digital Restrictions Management any less evil.

On the other hand, there was enough backlash to make MS decide to leave their servers on ... so who knows? I think that what is true, is that the more this happens, the more people will realise they don't want DRM on their media. Like Linux adoption, there may never be a "Year Of The Anti-DRM": it may just be a slow awakening.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Panaqqa]

/. - Don't be in such a hurry to mod this "Funny". If the so called "Trusted Computing Initiative" goes through as planned, then indeed your Linux distro may well turn out to be illegal, especially if you have added or removed stuff and recompiled. In these cases, it will not be "approved" software as the hash will have changed.

All DRM is almost as completely screwed up as the laws that purport to deal with it. My personal favorite silly DRM law is the one which sets out massive penalties for circumventing a DRM mechanism - making anyone who holds the shift key while loading a CD into Windoze box a felon.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[v1]

The exact mistake you just made will start biting people in the not-so-distant future.

OK I can convert my collection of music to MP3, good and fine, no rush right? I'll do that next week.

Meanwhile, the servers go offline. Then Murphy stops by. HD crash. Glad I have a backup. Restore backup. "Change in hardware configuration detected, contacting authentication servers to renew license.... Error, unable to contact servers. Please call Yahoo Music Store support for assistance."

You lose.

The only way to avoid this is to get a law passed that requires DRM manufacturers to put DRM unlockers in escrow somewhere and in the event that they close shop, go out of business, their servers burn down, etc, the public is given the keys so they can unlock and strip the DRM from their purchases.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

s/most/all/

If you can listen to it, you can record it. That will always be true. DRM for music and video is a completely broken concept.

DRM for Video makes sense, especially in a "rental" situation.

If you "rent" a film, tv show or the like, DRM makes perfect sense. Let the renter watch it, set the DRM to expire after 3 days, then bam, it's gone. Useless. Saves having to go to the store, grab a DVD then return it after.

But yes, DRM on things you buy rather than rent is retarded.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[aliquis]

In my opinion not there either because really, why does it matter if you keep the copy and can watch it forever or can only see it one time? Where is the lost? Heck, I even own regular DVDs I bought like 5 years ago which I still haven't watched .. What says people would see their rented movies multiple times anyway?

Just sell the shit cheap and shoot for volume instead, no protection needed, especially if the consumers actually think the product is worth the price and prefer to buy it.

I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy? Or are you mostly paying to the person renting you the movie? In that case why is that so important? Why does renting even exist? If the companies only get a very small amount of money for rented copies but people still rent because it's cheaper and one only watch most stuff one time anyway they should hate it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jimicus]

/. - Don't be in such a hurry to mod this "Funny". If the so called "Trusted Computing Initiative" goes through as planned, then indeed your Linux distro may well turn out to be illegal, especially if you have added or removed stuff and recompiled. In these cases, it will not be "approved" software as the hash will have changed.

Just to pre-empt the inevitable shower of folk who have neither glanced at nor fully understood the implications of Trusted Computing saying "It's my computer, how will they stop me?"

In answer to those people, "Very simple. Your computer will no longer be a general purpose computer, it'll be a device like your Tivo or your DVD player. And, like your Tivo, it'll be more or less impossible to change the software on. Or, if you do, you'll create as many problems as you solve because online banking, shopping and even Internet access can and quite possibly will demand that your 'computer' prove it's fully "Trusted" before they have anything to do with it."

The technology has all been thought through very carefully and virtually every counter-argument (particularly the "it'll never work" arguments) has been dealt with in hardware. AFAICT, the only way you'll break it wholesale is by infiltrating a chip fab and maintaining the breakage for so long that it's not practical for the manufacturer to revoke all the compromised keys.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

In my opinion not there either because really, why does it matter if you keep the copy and can watch it forever or can only see it one time? Where is the lost?

One obvious loss is that you are over-ruling market forces, in the sense that a company might want to offer consumers a choice between paying full-price for a permanent copy of a work and paying a reduced fee for a one-off use (the rental model). This worked well for a long time with physical media, and may be in a consumer's interest. However, if you prohibit the use of DRM under any circumstances, the supplier's only option is to price on the assumption that every copy is a permanent one.

I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy?

Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.

Given the two points above, it is pretty clear that a rental model may be in the interests of both the consumer (who pays less if they only want to view something once anyway) and the producer (who gains access to a consumer market that might not be willing to pay full price for a permanent copy but would still like to watch the film).

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Chris Tucker]

"Equating Libertarianism to greed is a bit like equating free speech to hate speech."

As opposed to a Libertarian equating a waiting list for a movie from the public library to a Stalin-era Soviet Union breadline ?

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[elrous0]

Anything with DRM on it is just a rental. You don't own it, you're just renting it until the company you downloaded it from goes out of business or stops supporting it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[jimicus]

So open hardware will become more prevalent. There's obviously demand for unrestricted hardware, so somebody will make it.

Ahem:

Or, if you do, you'll create as many problems as you solve because online banking, shopping and even Internet access can and quite possibly will demand that your 'computer' prove it's fully "Trusted" before they have anything to do with it."

Nothing closed about TPM apart from the encryption keys themselves. You just can't claim to be "Trusted" without it.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I pirate all my music, it avoids problems like this.

Content produces claim they are "Losing sales" but its customers who are "Losing products" now a can justify my piracy by saying "its them or us"

No, you can't. You can justify "I don't want to buy for them because of that" but not "So I steal it because I deserve it regardless." as the latter doesn't hold true. You don't hold a right to listen to music just because it exists.

Now, it can be argued that they don't lose anything when you download if you wouldn't pay for that anyways and that I agree with. I also agree that record companies aren't losing significant money due to piratism. Hell, I'm a supporter of local Pirate Party myself and will very possibly vote them in the next elections...

However, saying that you can morally justify your piracy by "Well, I don't want to buy music in the terms they are selling it so that's why it is okay for me to download it" doesn't hold true. At all.

They have the right to sell music they have made and produced in the form they wish to and just because you don't want to buy that in that form, doesn't justify "Well, I'll get it without paying them."

I bet you 20 dollars you didn't send them the money for the songs after downloading the music in the form you like.

Re:People are still buying DRMd music.

[duggy_92127]

Just sell the shit cheap and shoot for volume instead, no protection needed, especially if the consumers actually think the product is worth the price and prefer to buy it.

That is a perfectly valid theory, that I pretty much think would turn out to work great. However, the simple truth is that you don't know how that would actually work in the real world. I don't, either; nobody does.

They've been running their business a certain way for a long time, and making a killing. Now we're in the digital age, and the context is different and changing rapidly. Expecting them to one day up and use a totally different pricing model than they've been making a killing with up to this point is silly. Of course they're going to try and do things the exact same way as they always have.

And they've got people assuring them it's possible. These companies that are making the DRM 'software' are also making a killing, and it's mostly because the media people believe what they're selling, which is the ability to keep doing things the way they always have, in this new and scary age. I have no idea if the DRM companies know what they're doing in futile or not; that depends on how cynical you are.

That's all I got.

Doug

Haha?

[fluch]

Come on, guys, what does it take so long to tag this story with the 'haha' tag??? Are you all asleep?

the real criminals

[pimpimpim]

Will they be fined for fraud? they charged their costumers not so much less as the price of a track on a CD for mp3s with an amazingly limited lifespan. For ripping of their costumers they risk what? Nothing. Whereas people getting their music from other online sources are being threatened with jailtime and god-knows-what. Russia was more or less not allowed to join Nato because the perfectly legal and costumer-friendly allofmp3.com.

Re:the real criminals

[LordLucless]

Yeah! When will there be an online music service that offers real costumer service? I want to know what music goes well with this pantomime lion suit.

Excellent news!

[TheRaven64]

While I feel sorry for the people who have lost their music as a result of this, it has two excellent outcomes

The first is that it gives a great example of why the analogy that I've been using for DRM'd goods for a while is accurate. When I'm explaining DRM'd products to non-technical people, I tell them that they are equivalent to things labelled 'sold as seen' at a jumble sale. You get them home and they may work, and they may continue to work. If they do, you might have got a good deal, but there is absolutely no guarantee that they will work, nor that they will continue to work in the future. In contrast, DRM-free goods are guaranteed to work for as long as you want them to.

The second is that it gives a perfect case study for persuading legislators that DRM should not be legal (or, as I usually argue, that technical and legal protections on creative works should be mutually exclusive - you can have whichever you prefer, but you can only pick one). There is no possible way in which allowing an organisation a government-granted monopoly to sell products and then remotely disable them fording you to buy them again from one of their other resellers can be good for the economy.

Well duh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when you're essentially *renting* your music or movies. It's just a matter of when they're going to stop letting you use it. This will surely happen to those who bought songs from the itunes store (DRM'ed ones), it's really just a matter of when.

The same applies to some software even. Imagine what will happen to Windows XP-style activated apps if the company goes out of business, or just plain decides to stop activating it (could perhaps be legal, using clauses in the purchase agreement or whatever, or not so legal...)

Re:Well duh?

[DarkOx]

Thats a good point IT WILL HAPPEN. Itunes might be arround for 20 years but some day it will be closed. I think the longevity might be the sadest part of all. Unless Apple in the end pushes some automajic code in a later release that strips the DRM from any protected files it finds most people won't ever be bothered to do it, and won't be thinking about it when ITMS shuts down.

Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost.

Re:Well duh?

[TomRK1089]

"Children won't be rediscovering momy and daddys 20 year old records in the future. DRM could cause an entire generations music to be lost."

Oh no! How will our descendants survive without being able to appreciate the lyrical genius of K-Fed, NSYNC, and My Chemical Romance? It really is the end of the world!

Question!

[neokushan]

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?

Re:Question!

[geordie_loz]

Erm.. YSYRTSIYTIIIYPA (You Say You're Refusing To Say IANAL Yet There It Is In Your Post Anyways)
:)

Yahoo Music is a Rental Service

[Jellybob]

I may be entirely wrong, but I thought that Yahoo Music worked on a rental basis, where you could listen to as much music as liked so long you kept paying the service fee, so this isn't quite as bad as the OP made it sound.

People havn't *bought* the music, so they havn't lost something that they paid money for, expecting it to continue being available for the rest of time.

Isn't it ironic...

[Solo-Malee]

...that this story follows that in the UK where six ISPs have now agreed a deal that will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music. Now I suppose there'll be a few more trying to get replacements for tracks that yesterday they were able to listen to and today they can't.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7522334.stm

I just hope that the BBC picks up this latest music industry/tech fiasco and asks the question...

"Who is looking after the consumer?"

Me, I'll always be buying the original CD (preferably from an indie artist!)

Why MSN Music store was going.

[Kingston]

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.

long live Amazon

[misanthrope101]

Amazon has gotten more of my money for DRM-free music than I had previously spent on music my entire life. I'm not even that big on music, but somehow I ended up with about 25 Nina Simone albums, about the same number of Billie Hoiday, 15 CDs or so of Dinah Washington, and who knows what else. Never would've bought this stuff if they'd DRM'd it.

Re:long live Amazon

[MtViewGuy]

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.

Re:long live Amazon

[Plantain]

5) Not available outside of the US

Even with a fake name and address, they go to extreme measures to stop the poor Aussies from getting their music :'(

Back to the iTunes monopoly I go!

(if you != fed; do s/iTunes/bittorrent/)

Re:long live Amazon

[MasterOfMagic]

I go with AllOfMP3, now under a new name (that we dare not speak!). They offer all music in MP3 format using LAME or bladeenc in CBR or VBR modes. They offer a lot of music (I'd say about 35-40% on average for the stuff I listen to and 100% of the new stuff they add) in FLAC, Monkey's Audio, MPC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, raw WAV, and probably a few formats that I'm forgetting. It's all DRM free, and $0.02/MB for downloading. Oh, and it works on any OS with a web browser that accepts cookies, and works outside of the United States. (Pair Firefox with DownThemAll for the downloads page and you've got your music downloading app.)

IANAL, but from what I've read they're legal in the US (they pay their licensing body fees). They're good, and the content industry hates them. They tried to pay the artists, but the body representing the artists rejected it.

And that is why

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is why I only buy non-DRMed "plus" songs from iTunes. While I trust Apple, and love their products, I think putting trust into DRM is asking for just a weeeee bit too much.

i have an excellent comment to make

[circletimessquare]

please send $5 to my pay pal account to read my comment

(oh man, i'm going to be a millionaire! it works for the music industry!)

Re:i have an excellent comment to make

[illumastorm]

*torrents comment*

S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[EmagGeek]

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.

Re:S/PDIF Interfaces can save your music

[Mascot]

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.

Where's the list of these failures?

[v1]

Is anyone keeping a list somewhere of all the places that have folded or closed a service and have as a result left people with unusable content? This is at least the third story I've read on /. about this sort of stunt, and we've also read where DRM supporters are always saying this sort of thing never happens, I'd love to see that list stuffed in their mouth.

Well that sucks...

[The Dancing Panda]

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.

Here's one for you - now thats costumer service..

[Barsteward]

http://www.last.fm/music/Tight+Fit/_/The+Lion+Sleeps+Tonight

Re:How much would it cost to keep the servers?

[yuna49]

I wondered the same thing when Microsoft announced the end of its service.

Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires some type of licensing fees as long as the server is available online? Perhaps the contract with the music companies requires them to take the server down once the music service itself is discontinued? I can imagine either or both of these being true.

In defense of Yahoo Music service (sort of)

[Qwavel]

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?