4 Comments

Yahoo Makes Nice, Offers To Replace DRM Infected Files or Refund

July 29, 2008 by in Random with 4 Comments

When Yahoo shut its doors on its music store, it illustrated the major flaw with DRMed music. Once the provider is no longer is in business your music won’t play. Yahoo, being extremely generous, has offered to either replace or refund the music files.

We were a bit surprised last week when Yahoo decided to shut down its DRM servers, rendering all sorts of “purchased” music close to worthless. After all, when Microsoft had done the same thing, public outcry forced Microsoft to keep the servers running for a few more years. Now Yahoo has leapfrogged that decision, promising either refunds or a replacement DRM-free version of tracks that you downloaded via its service. This may turn out to be expensive for Yahoo, but that’s what the company gets for agreeing to a DRM’d solution in the first place, rather than trusting its instincts and telling the labels to ditch the DRM years ago. [via]

Do you buy DRMed music? Do you download DRM free music? Do you not even buy music? Sound off!


  • http://web.mac.com/barra_240t/ Nigel

    I use the iTunes Store, so I get a mixture of both.

  • http://mavrev.com Matt

    I don’t buy DRMed music at all, I hardly buy music online. If I do I use Amazon. I prefer to buy CD’s because the quality is so much better than what you get on iTunes.

  • Hitsuji

    Most music I download these days are direct from the artists, usuall because t’s free and you can choose the type of quality you want. Strangely enough NiN’s last album is served up at your choice as mp3s, flacs, hd flacs,.m4a’s or as a 1.5GB torrent of .wav’s.

  • Zack

    I have a whole bunch of DRM-d tracks from the iTS from back before I actually understood the implications, but now I try to only buy DRM free. Helps me not make impulse buys, too.

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