"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?" "
I had Yahoo! Music a few years ago and really liked it until my licenses would no longer update, and after 3-4 email exchanges, uinstall/reinstalls, I demanded a partial refund and that was the last time I'd ever deal with DRM like that again. If you have Yahoo! Music, you have about 60 days to burn what you want to CD and re-rip it unprotected so you can listen to what you purchased. And for your music needs, see Amazon's MP3 store. Everything there is unlocked.
Here is the question. Is Yahoo going to come out with a non-DRM music store? If so, they've just peeved off their existing customer base (the most likely and easiest group to convince to make new purchases). Instead, why not offer existing customers the non-DRMd version of their purchases for free? They have already paid for them. They could have actually made a good PR situation out of this.
No one should *ever* spend money on DRM'd music, not unless they're willing to burn it to CD and re-rip it to bypass the DRM.
Didn't Yahoo!'s music store use Microsoft based DRM? Wouldn't something like FairUse4WM work to rip the DRM off of the tracks. I know FairUse4WM is a touchy subject because it could be used for piracy but for a situation such as this it could be a godsend. I would hate to burn my entire music collection to CD's and then rerip them into an even more subpar quality.
This is why I buy all my digital downloads from Amazon.
I feel bad for the customers who bought the music from Yahoo, but deeply despise Yahoo for buying MusicMatch which was my all-time favorite player and provider of music (even though DRM'd, too).
Of course, I guess part of the blame rests on the greed of the original Music Match owners, doesn't it.
Amazon has a good selection, but they're overpriced. I recommend MP3 Fiesta - DRM-free, good quality, and only $.20 per track. http://mp3fiesta.com/
This looks like son of AllofMP3.com. Domain registered out of Ukraine. At best probably quasi legal. I nor my credit card would touch this with a 10 foot pole.
I'm noticing not every song on albums is the same bitrate, either. Bizarre bitrates too. 194kbps? 223kbps? 208kbps? What gives with that? I'd almost go so far as to ask if they're not simply compiling each song on an album from P2P networks then selling them.
Yahoo! Music Pulls Plug On Store And DRM Servers
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