Yahoo Music closing. Claims it will "compensate" customers for DRM

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by bwaldron

Yes, Rhapsody has recently started selling unencumbered mp3 files (that can, of course, be played on any device).

The trend in music sales is clear -- hopefully eBooks will follow.

and, hopefully they will get there faster than the music industry did. i really don't want to wait X years for this. if they have any sense they're following these trends in the music industry as well (it's completely relevant to them), let's just hope they are smart enough to see the obvious conclusions without repeating each individual step themselves.

[Statch]

I'm one of the unfortunate Yahoo Music! customers. After I read the posting here saying they were going to offer a remedy, I wrote them and here's the answer I got back:

"If you have problems with your track licenses after the store closes, we
will provide coupons to the Rhapsody MP3 store so you can purchase an
equivalent collection of MP3s. These coupons will not be available until
the Yahoo! Music Unlimited store has closed. This offer will remain open
until December 31st, 2008."

It looks like they're only going to compensate people who have problems. (I plan on being one of them.)

I'm probably a good example of what they've done to the industry by this. I subscribed about two years ago. I hadn't bought music in 10 years before that. In the two years, I've bought about 30 CDs worth of music, because I can finally try the music before buying it. But I don't plan to switch to Rhapsody because of the higher cost, and they've left me with these DRM tracks that I'm going to have trouble using in the future. I spent about an hour researching the best way to convert my tracks into DRM-free MP3s and have realized how much time it's going to take. I feel completely cheated, and won't touch DRM'ed music again.

I do buy DRM ebooks all the time, but I'm reconsidering that now too because of this. For recent books, looks like the options are going back to print books or doing something illegal.

I have to wonder how badly both of these industries want customers! If their business plans call for driving away good customers, they're a rousing success.

[HarryT]

If you are going to be able to obtain your music as DRM-free MP3 tracks, in what way exactly have you been "cheated"? Your logic slightly eludes me.

[Statch]

Harry, of course you're right -- they're saying they're going to compensate any of us who have problems after the Yahoo Music store closes.

However, the truth is that everyone who purchased tracks is going to have problems at some point, and I also only know about the offer of compensation because I wrote them. I'm hoping they plan to e-mail all of us later with the offer, but what happens to the person who doesn't experience the problems until farther down the road, after the store has closed?

Really what this has done is opened my eyes to the evils of DRM. I know I was naive to have trusted the companies before. I keep reading comments on the Internet about how stupid the 400,000 of us who signed up for Yahoo Music were, and I agree that I was, but I honestly didn't realize that I didn't have rights to the tracks I purchased. (I thought the licenses were on my computer; I didn't understand that I needed access to the Yahoo Music store server to be able to keep those rights if something changed with my computer situation, and that I couldn't just move those licenses to another computer.)

A long way of saying that you're right, but that it really doesn't matter. They're going to have left a lot of people with bad tastes in their mouths over the whole experience and have harmed the industry by not just being up front and making the offer immediately and publicly.

[Alisa]

So Yahoo hasn't emailed all it's subscribers with this announcement? I hope they do otherwise that's pretty shady especially since the offer is only open for 5 more months. If a customer doesn't catch the announcement and isn't actively visiting the site at the moment, they may be left out in the cold. I still see people complaining about Amazon's previous failed ebook venture and they gave people a year to re-download their stuff. I'm not sure how good the communication was to customers, though, since I wasn't involved in it.

[Statch]

I only got the notification because I saw the posting here and emailed their customer service. Hopefully they will send out a mass mailing.

I did check Rhapsody to make sure that all their tracks are DRM-free, so that I'll be able to replace my exact music.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If you are going to be able to obtain your music as DRM-free MP3 tracks, in what way exactly have you been "cheated"? Your logic slightly eludes me.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but from the message posted before:
"If you have problems with your track licenses after the store closes, we
will provide coupons to the Rhapsody MP3 store so you can purchase an
equivalent collection of MP3s. "

I don't see anything about being to obtain your music in DRM-free form. I see them offering coupons of equivalent value to buy music available on Rhapsody. If your music isn't available there, you would be out of luck.