No more DRM for Yahoo! Music
Yahoo! Music will be shutting down its DRM servers on Sept. 30 2008, one month later than what was scheduled for MSN. All Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers should have received the announcement on July 25. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Yahoo! indicated earlier in the year that experiments were showing a marked increase in sales on music where DRM features were removed.
Surprisingly, Yahoo! Music has decided to offer refunds to its non-subscribers who purchased DRM protected music. Subscribers will be transfered over to Rhapsody. This is in stark contrast to MSN extending the lifetime of their key servers to 2011.
There are people out there, including the EFF, that are heralding the move as both a good and generous one.
I tend to disagree. I am fairly certain that the move was made out of good business sense, rather than generosity. In all likelihood there is a small number of users who purchased DRM’d music from Yahoo! and did not subscribe. In which case, its cheaper to give out refunds rather than continuing to run servers. Additionally, it makes Yahoo! look good to those opposed to DRM. With so many large companies stealing from their customers these days, doing anything but will bode well for the branding. The music service is now in the news more than it ever was in the past.
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Transferring subscribers over to Rhapsody is far from generous. It’s service is almost considered a joke compared to Amazon and iTunes. Plus Rhapsody is DRM’d. So transferring you from DRM to a different DRM doesn’t sound very generous to me. But what do I know.