Yahoo! to Take DRM Music Servers Offline

Last Wednesday, Yahoo contacted customers telling them that the company would no longer provide support for the service, and  that customers would no longer be able to play their purchased music after September 30. Microsoft made a similar move to turn off its MSN Music service earlier this year, but postponed the shutoff to 2011.

Yahoo advised customers to make an effort to burn their protected music to a disc, effectively removing the copy protection, but such an action reduces audio quality and leaves customers with an impaired version of the purchased product. In an ultimate slap in the face, Yahoo reminds customers they can still (re)purchase their favorite songs from the newly-partnered Rhapsody download service.

The fear that your music can suddenly stop working certainly illustrates one of the major problems with DRM. The fact is, the users bought music from these services purely out of convenience, and turning them off enrages loyal customers and makes them even more unlikely to buy music in digital form online again. Even though Yahoo isn’t performing as well as it could, freezing new purchases and keeping the server online would have sufficed.

This afternoon, Yahoo alerted customers of its erstwhile downloadable music store that it would no longer provide support after Sept. 30 (download the cheerful e-mail here). The upshot: starting Oct. 1, said customers won’t be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo won’t be providing any more keys to the songs’ DRM wrappers. But hey, they can always buy MP3 versions from Yahoo’s new partner Rhapsody!