Microsoft Pulling Support for MSN Music DRM (Updated)

Music fans who purchased music from Microsoft's MSN Music service are in for another cruel awakening about the harsh realities of digital rights management. As of September 1, it will become impossible to reauthorize songs purchased from the MSN Music store, which Microsoft shuttered to make way for Zune.

Update: Microsoft has changed its mind – for the time being, anyway.

Music purchased from MSN Music will still play on authorized machines, but users must transfer the music onto whatever computers they want it to play on before the cut-off date.

What should you do if you want to keep your music? As Sony advised its users to do when it closed down Sony Connect, you can burn CDs of your purchased tracks and re-rip them. Of course, this degrades sound quality because it forces the music through the encoding process twice. In addition, you can't use a CD-RW burn a music CD, so people could end up having to use a whole stack of CD-Rs.

MSN Entertainment and Video Services general manager Rob Bennett broke the bad news to former users of the MSN Music service in an email on Tuesday:

As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support theretrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music orthe authorization of additional computers. You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songsdownloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do sobefore August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs toadditional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will notsuccessfully play.

(via Ars Technica; Photo: mskogly)