Microsoft has announced it will soon no longer provide support for music purchased from its now-defunct music store. According to an email from MSN's Entertainment and Video Services general manager:
As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers. You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.
Which means: if you bought music from the MSN Music store (which of course came with some good ol' DRM), then you will have to either own the same computer and operating system for the rest of your life or lose all the digital music that you actually paid for. You could get around this by burning CDs of everything you downloaded and then ripping them into a playable format, but is this really the way Microsoft wants to treat their customers? Can you imagine someone trying to play music on Windows XP 10 years down the line?
Wonder what would happen if Apple stopped supporting its FairPlay DRM. Yikes. If you're 20 and purchasing tons of DRM music, either you should be thinking of a backup plan or you have tremendous faith in big companies.
