Wal-Mart Drops DRM Servers, Customers Lose Music

To those of you who were loyal early adopters of Wal-Mart's music download service, Wal-Mart has a message for you: Say goodbye to your music. Since February Wal-Mart has offered only DRM-free songs for download, but before that customers of Wal-Mart's service could download songs encoded with DRM. BoingBoing picked up an e-mail Wal-Mart sent to its customers saying the DRM servers will be shut down on October 9, making it impossible for customers to transfer their DRM encoded music to a music device or another PC after that date.

Wal-Mart is just following the recent trend of screwing over customers by dropping DRM, as led by Microsoft and Yahoo. Sure, customers can burn their DRM songs to a CD to preserve their songs after the DRM servers are shut down, but why should customers be punished with extra work for buying their songs legally? Can someone remind me how is this supposed to prevent piracy? Downloading songs from a P2P network is easy enough that even a non-tech-savvy person can do it, while dealing with legal DRM workarounds takes a level of technical knowledge that the average consumer just might not have.

I have no problem with DRM encoding when it works. But DRM only works when companies are willing to keep the DRM servers running. Once those servers are down, the downloaded music is exposed as the rental that it really is. Now I'm just wondering what will happen when iTunes eventually and inevitably shuts down its own DRM servers. I hope some forward-thinking programmer over at Apple can come up with a solution to remove the DRM from its songs by then, or there will incredible customer backlash.

I applaud Wal-Mart for switching to selling only DRM-free music, but at the same time it isn't right for Wal-Mart to drop its existing customers (the ones who helped build the business). How hard would it be for Wal-Mart to allow its customers to download their DRM encoded songs again in the now-offered DRM-free format? Customers shouldn't be inconvenienced for buying their songs legally. That's just bad business.

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