Normally, the biggest reason cited to buy DRM-free music is to be able to play your purchased songs using whatever player or computer you own as opposed to being restricted through the license on the music in some way. Last last week, users of Yahoo! Music Store were told that any music they bought will no longer work as of September 30, 2008 when the DRM license key servers are taken offline. Yahoo! apparently suggests to users to burn music cds from the songs they "own" the license to, then rip the music cds into mp3s again. As Ars Technica put it and The Washington Post quoted from them, "Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!"
There are plenty of places now that you can buy DRM-free music legally. iTunes Store Music defaults to DRM music at $0.99, but you have the choice to buys DRM-free music for $1.29 instead. Rhapsody recently opened up a section to buy DRM-free music for $0.99, and Amazon
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Another Reason to Buy DRM-free Music
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2 comments:
Yahoo's not the first. Microsoft did the same thing about a year ago.
As for DRM-free stores, the only reason I don't like Amazon.com's MP3 store is that they require you to use their funky little downloader program, which frankly I don't trust to install on any serious work computers.
As other DRM-free alternatives, you forgot about Magnatune, pretty much the most Peace&Love music store out there (you choose your price, 50% goes directly to the artist, lossless encodings available, downloads are practically on the honor system). I love Magnatune, but their selection is limited.
Also, eMusic. Subscription based, but pretty cheap (comes out to about $0.20~$0.25 per song if you remember to buy all your songs every month).
And finally, if you have no problem living on the "might not be entirely legal" side of things, Mp3Sparks.
Interesting. I have to say I didn't know about Magnatune, but will be searching it for songs I want!
As for Microsoft, yeah I know they did the same thing, but at least they eventually relented and agreed to keep their servers up until 2011. So far it's looking like Yahoo!'s not going to relent and that their servers will be going down in about 2 months.
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