There’s some truly bad news in store for customers of the Yahoo! Music Store. The web giant plans to slam the doors on its music download service, switching off its DRM authorisation servers at the same time – meaning all the users who’ve legally purchased their tunes from Yahoo! won’t be able to transfer them to another computer. They’ll have to burn the tracks to audio CD – not a huge drawback if you’ve bought an album or two, but what if you’ve bought 50? Or 100?
It’s worth repeating: customers who have LEGALLY downloaded music from this service have been left out in the cold – which seems like a fantastically empty-headed PR move in light of this week’s efforts from Feargal Sharkey and friends to frighten file-sharers into renouncing their wicked ways. After all, why buy DRM-protected music and have it unfairly ripped out of your hands at the whim of a profit-chasing media behemoth, when you can download it for free and receive nothing more than a slightly scary letter from Virgin?
Yahoo! Music (via Distorted Loop)
