Last Thursday, we reported that Yahoo Music was going to shut down its store and DRM licensing servers on September 30, which was basically going to leave anybody who ever bought music from the Yahoo Music Store without a license to play their music. Now, however, Yahoo has announced that it will issue a refund to its customers for the full value of their purchases. According to a report on CNet, Yahoo is also looking at making copies of the music its customers bought available to them as MP3s without any DRM.
Users who were using Yahoo’s subscription service will be transferred over to Real’s Rhapsody subscription service. Rhapsody also offers DRM free MP3s for sale.
Just Burn a CD
As we reported last week, Yahoo was already advising its customers to circumvent its own DRM system by just burning copies of their songs onto audio CDs and then ripping them back onto their computers as DRM-free MP3s. Apparently, though, not all customers were satisfied with this solution, though given the new solution, enterprising customers could also, of course, now burn their songs to CDs and still ask for their money back from Yahoo.
Costly Precedent
Yahoo is setting a (costly) precedent here for other music services than run into similar problems. When MSN Music shut down, it was originally going to take its licensing servers offline within a year, but because of customer complaints, it is keeping them online until the end of 2011. MSN Music is not planning on returning any money to its customers, though.
