Wal-Mart has decided to keep the music that it sold wrapped in a layer of copyright protection playable, following a flurry of customer complaints about legally purchased music becoming unplayable. The probably wishes it had never tangled with digital rights management, because it's going to keep paying for it long after its switch to selling DRM-free MP3s.
An e-mail sent to Wal-Mart digital music store customers said the company will continue to support the DRM-ed song files sold on walmart.com starting in 2003. The e-mail reversed last month's announcement that Wal-Mart would shut down the servers that authenticate the copyright protected music it no longer sells. Unfortunately, doing so would render all protected music purchased from the store in the past five years unplayable.
Customers of this Windows-only, Internet Explorer-only web-based music store were not pleased with Wal-Mart's advice on how to deal with the proposed shutdown, which is exactly what Sony told its customers when Sony Connect went under: Rip and burn. In fact, Wal-Mart says its customers should do that anyway, just to be on the safe side.
But protected music cannot be burned onto data CDs, only ontouncompressed audio CDs. If you bought 200 protected songsfrom Wal-Mart, you'd have to burn 13 CDs and re-encode all ofthem back onto your computer – fairly time consuming. And makingmatters worse, all of that music would end up having been processed bya second audio compression algorithm (most likely MP3) in addition tothe original WMA compression. Not only did Wal-Mart's advice on how todeal with its proposed DRM plan involve a hassle and extra expense onthe part of the consumer, but that extra round of compression couldalso hurt the songs' audio quality.
After e-mailers and commentators explained
to Wal-Mart how much harm shutting down its DRM authentication serverswould cause its customers, the company backpedaled, and will keep its DRM
servers running – for now anyway. In addition, it will continue toemploy support staff with the unenviable chore of helping Wal-Mart customersnavigate the rocky landscape of Microsoft's aging PlaysForSure DRM, which Microsoft won't even use in its own store.
For Wal-Mart – a company obsessed with keeping costs down – the price of keeping Microsoft's aging DRM system on life support will be a sour reminder of why copyright protection on individual songdownloads was such a bad idea in the first place. At least the companyhas learned its lesson and is abandoning music DRM entirely.
While they're at it, why not make the Wal-Mart music store work with operating systems other than Windows and browsers other than Internet Explorer? The company says over 60 percent of its customers have internet access, and music has traditionally been one of its strong suits in the physical retail world. It has a big incentive for continuing to get its act together online.
See Also:
- Wal-Mart Pushes Customers Off DRM Fence
- Sony Connect Music Store Closing (Sony Players to Add PlaysforSure)
- Microsoft Pulling Support for MSN Music DRM (Updated)
- Screwed for Sure
(Photo: Ravi Patel; via Gizmodo)
