'Burned' by Yahoo's DRM

Recently I was told that hundreds of songs I had purchased from Yahoo! Music Unlimited will probably be rendered unplayable after it gets melded into the Rhapsody service (see story).

The music files are "protected" with Digital Rights Management and I won't be able to play them on any additional computers. Worse, Yahoo won't support the retrieval of license keys that are required to play on my authorized computers, so if there is "a change to the computer's operating system," they won't be playable at all.

Yahoo doesn't say exactly what types of OS changes will invalidate the license keys. That might be useful information.

For users who purchased tracks, Yahoo says: "we highly recommend that you back up the purchased tracks to an audio CD before the closing of the Store on September 30, 2008. Backing up your music to an audio CD will allow you to copy the music back to your computer again if the license keys for your original music files cannot be retrieved."

So if I want to listen to songs I paid for after making an OS change, I'll have to first burn them onto audio CDs and then re-rip them to my PC.

Sure, no problem. How long can that take for several hundred songs? How many CDs? I'll get right on it. And what will happen to the quality after burning and re-ripping? I've read this is a "lossy" process, which means the quality will degrade.

Oh, by the way, Yahoo says, if I transfer my account to Rhapsody, I'll be paying $12.99 per month, up from my current $8.99.

It gets better. If I go along with the transfer to the more expensive Rhapsody, my DRM MP3 files will be imported into the new service and will be playable, I'm told. Or will they? After telling me that, Yahoo said "We strongly recommend you back up your purchased tracks to CDs in the event that they do not play successfully in Rhapsody" [italics added]. Does it sound like these guys know what they're doing?

More good news: my "subscription" songs -- files that were downloaded to my PC as part of my subscription but not actually purchased -- will become unplayable.

Many, many others have long lambasted the inconvenience of DRM and the stupidity of the music industry, so I won't even get into that. It's almost beyond belief.

But guess what? I don't care. That's because every time I purchased a song from Yahoo, I took the time to play it and at the same time record it with Audacity, which exported the recording as a DRM-free MP3 file. The quality might have been degraded, but I set the bit rate setting in Audacity to match Yahoo, so I'm not sure. I'm not an audiophile and usually only listen to these MP3s when I'm working out, so all I really care about is tempo and volume.

Probably illegal as hell. I don't care. I've spent hundreds of dollars to buy these songs and I want to be able to listen to them. Come get me, RIAA.

And no, I won't be joining Rhapsody.

BitTorrent, here I come.