Welcome to Our newsroom!

Microsoft turns off its music

Imagine if you lost all your CDs. Not suddenly, as in a theft, but gradually, as if to decay or rust – it never sleeps, you know.

Or imagine an even more gradual musical death, if you suddenly had to decide which CD players would be able to play your CDs. If you chose your current car, they wouldn't work in your next one. If you picked the stereo in your living room, they wouldn't play in the bedroom. This sounds ridiculous – but it's also realistic.

Last week, Ars Technica reported that Microsoft will stop supporting its PlaysForSure music format this summer. This doesn't mean that the music will stop playing – just that they will only play on a computer, and operating system, that has already been chosen to work with them. And fans can burn their songs to CD and then re-rip them as MP3s, but that's not anyone's idea of fun. Given the built-in obsolescence of technology, that means the clock has started ticking. The irony that this is happening to a format called PlaysForSure has not been lost on anyone.

At this point, most of you are probably wondering what exactly PlaysForSure is. A little history: Back before the introduction of the Zune, Microsoft supported a DRM music format called PlaysForSure, which it sold from the MSN Music Store, as well as several other sites. Its plans were ambitious – MTV got involved, as did several MP3 makers. But it could never compete with iTunes. Like Microsoft's operating systems, it was inelegant and hard to use. Microsoft itself stopped selling songs in this format when it introduced the Zune, effectively competing with its corporate partners. Since then, customers have been wondering how long the company would support the format. Now they know.

Ars Technica and other sites argue that this limits a customer's rights to play the music he purchased. But that depends on what those rights are. When people pay a dollar to buy a song online, most believe that they're doing just that: buying a song. A lawyer would say that they're buying the rights to play a song in a certain set of ways on a certain set of devices. The same goes for CDs. Record companies say they're selling a piece of plastic but consumers believe they're buying music they can use however they like. Technically, some of this is settled in the legal jargon in online sites. But it's unreasonable to expect every teenager who buys a single to wade through pages of legal jargon.

At this point, the issue is practically settled, as the major record labels are slowly abandoning DRM. In the meantime, though, anyone who sells music should be required to make sure it keeps playing. Otherwise, why will people keep buying it?