Microsoft to MSN Music owners: You're outta luck

Happen to get an e-mail from Microsoft yesterday entitled "MSN Music Store Support Notification"? It reads (in delightfully obfuscating passive voice) that Redmond is about to "change the level of support to be offered" for any DRM-protected MSN Music tunes you bought prior to November 2006. Translation: Your music will be stuck—forever—on whichever devices they happen to be sitting, come August 31.

Here's the deal: Before Microsoft's Zune Marketplace, there was MSN Music, an iTunes-like music portal where you could buy DRM-protected music. Microsoft shuttered the MSN Music storefront (although the site itself still exists) back in November 2006 in favor of the Zune Marketplace, but—until now, at least—it has continued to support the copy protection scheme for any songs purchased from MSN Music.

That's an important point, because those DRM license keys (which are stored on Microsoft's servers) allow you to authorize new PCs for the music you bought—and if, say, you buy a new desktop system, you must authorize it before you can transfer DRM-protected music to it. In the case of MSN Music, you're allowed to authorize up to five systems at any given time.

But now, evidently, Microsoft has tired of supporting the DRM for MSN Music tunes, and as of August 31, 2008, you will no longer be able to authorize new devices to play music you bought from MSN Music prior to November 14, 2006.

That means if you have all your MSN Music songs—which you bought and paid for—on an old laptop, and they're still there after August 31, there they will stay, permanently. You'll still be able to play your tunes, but when your laptop goes kaput, your songs will go down with it.

And this is one of the reasons why DRM, not to put too fine a point on it, blows. Once you buy a DRM-protected song or video file, your media is pretty much at the mercy of the company that sold it to you. If said company goes under or decides they're no longer going to support their own DRM, then, well, you're out of luck. (Chris blogged about a previous example—involving videos sold by Major League Baseball—late last year.)

Of course, if you want to keep your old MSN Music tunes and use them as you please, you can always burn them to an audio CD and re-rip them as MP3s—but then you'll have to retag them, as well as lose some audio quality in the process.

So, who else out there bought MSN Music in the past and got this e-mail?