Walmart started selling music back in August 2007. The music was protected by DRM for the first six month after which Walmart decided that the hassle was not worth it. DRM was removed from all songs and users were able to purchase DRM free songs from then on.

The announcement that Walmart would shut down its DRM servers was send by email to all customers who purchased songs protected by DRM from one of the biggest companies in the world. The consequence for the user is dire. It is possible to play the songs on the authorized computer but it will not be possible to burn them or listen to them on a new computer after October 9, the day the servers are shut down.

Walmart is suggesting to burn the music to CD to be able to move them to a new computer. The first thing that is odd about this recommendation is a general observation. DRM was allegedly implemented to prevent the unauthorized copying of protected media. If users are able to burn the media to CD and rip those CDs back to a computer then the system failed miserably. What’s the purpose of protecting files with DRM if anyone can bypass it that easily?

The second odd thing about this is that a company like Walmart is seemingly not capable of providing a better solution to their customers. They simply pull the plug and the customers have to see how they can access their purchased music in the future.

Lastly what happens to customers who would like to re-download a song that they have purchased at the music store? Will they be able to download it again DRM free or will Walmart simply state that the song is no longer available? A commenter at the Boing Boing site mentioned that he tried to download songs that he purchased again from Walmart but was not able to do so because they were no longer available.

The only positive aspect is that another company is getting rid of DRM. The feeling remains though that it has more to do with the complexity of DRM and the additional costs of the servers and support than fulfilling customer demand.

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A current trend seems to be to include identifying tags into the downloaded music. While that is not a huge problem if you keep a close eye on your music collection you could run into troubles if someone would steal your computer, notebook or mp3 player. Besides that every single song is available on those networks anyway.

It’s a gray area legally in my opinion and I would suggest to everyone to remove the identifying information from those songs.

Rhapsody is storing the Download ID which identifies the user who purchased and downloaded the song in several tags, those tags are: COMM, TXXX, TXXX01, TXXX02, APIC, GEOB.

Every mp3 tag editor can clear the information in these tags but it is also possible to use a small perl script to get rid of the tags. The Reddit user Keck (via Arsgeek) published it on Reddit and everyone can copy and paste the script from his Reddit user page.

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There’s nothing wrong in wanting to beat iTunes. However, the way Nokia is going about things, you’d think they were trying to scare away all their customers. It’s a case of how do I frighten thee? Let me count the ways.

Let’s start by getting to the site. I accessed the site using Firefox and was told that the music store does not support the browser. You can only get to the site using IE6 or higher. That’s strike one. To transfer the music to your phone, you need to have Windows XP or Vista. That’s strike two since it shuts out all the Linux and Mac users.

Assuming you fulfill the first two criteria, the fun doesn’t stop there. Music on the site is only available in the proprietary ‘wma’ format, so your phone needs to have Windows Media Player to play your tunes. At $1.70 a song, it might interest you to know that the songs are DRM enabled as well. So, you cannot play the song anywhere else except for your phone.

In my first para, I mentioned Nokia was looking to topple iTunes. Their most brilliant strategy to do that? The songs cannot be played on iPod. That’s right, the most popular portable media player will not play any of these songs. Brilliant marketing strategy isn’t it?

To quote Andre Yoskowitz at Afterdawn, “I’m not sure who at Nokia thought that offering expensive, DRM-crippled music that cannot be played on iPods was a good idea but they should not have a job.”

How many of you would be willing to purchase music like this? What do you think of Nokia’s marketing strategy? What’s your opinion on these kind of arm-twisting tactics? Let me know.

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What made me turn away back then is slowly becoming a problem for those users who did not turn away, who did purchase music and videos on those Internet stores. DRM is dependent on that store and license servers. If those stores and servers are gone, be it because the company ceases to exist or because it makes the decision to close the online store, then guess what ? The user is left with DRM files that cannot be transferred to a new computer or retrieved anymore. Without a licensing server there is no way to activate the music and videos legally.

How does that sound ? Some users defended DRM by stating that smaller companies would probably run into those problems but if a user would buy from big companies, like Microsoft, Apple or Yahoo they would not run into them. (Was not Google involved in something similar last year?) This can be easily refuted right now by pointing to the announcement that Microsoft made:

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.

So, if you did purchase music from MSN Music you better start burning the music to CDs and DVDs and rip them again to get rid of the DRM so that you can keep the music that you did purchase for a lifetime.

I do not feel sorry for the users who made the purchases. If no one would buy music with DRM the companies would sooner than later start online shops without DRM. Not that it protects anything either.

via [Download Squad]

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