Subscription Music: Additional Consolidations And DRM Tribulations

Well that sucks. I’ve long been a fervent fan of subscription music services (as well as having long been a subscriber to Yahoo! Music Unlimited). At the same time, I’ve editorially acknowledged the substantial mindset shift that subscription music service providers had on their hands; unlike video rentals, which are a familiar and well-established usage model, consumers’ mindset with respect to owning their music is deeply entrenched. Truth be told, consumers have never owned their music, as innumerable RIAA lawsuits suggest…the studios (and, in some cases, the artists) own the music, and all that consumers purchase is a narrowly-defined right to access that music, but I digress…

Yahoo! Music Unlimited, widespread industry scuttlebutt suggests, has long had a For Sale sign on it. Yahoo!’s fiscal woes are well known, and as Yahoo! Music’s General Manager, Ian C. Rogers, points out in his post:

The fact of the matter is that building a great premium music service takes a huge amount of resources and effort, and it was taking energy away from our important main offerings, music.yahoo.com (the Web’s #1 Music destination), music videos, and LAUNCHcast Radio. Around 25 million people visit Yahoo! Music each month. Relatively speaking, a small percentage of those use Yahoo! Music Unlimited, yet an large portion of our resources were being poured into this service. It was clear to us that we needed to make a major strategic shift.

RealNetworks and its Rhapsody service were the most frequently mentioned possible suitors, but the two companies seemingly weren’t able to agree on a price. Per my last-Friday comment to Ron Wilson’s commentary on Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Yahoo!, I guess all it takes is a little competition to get the deal done, huh? This announcement leaves me in a bit of a quandary. Yahoo! Music Unlimited’s subscription service is based on Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM, which the various media extenders in my abode (two Xbox 360s and two Roku Labs SoundBridges) natively support.

Rhapsody, on the other hand, began phasing out the PlaysForSure DRM over a year ago in favour of its own proprietary DRM scheme. Rhapsody-cognizant Sandisk Sansa players, for example, are differentiated by ‘R’ suffixes in their product names…although, interestingly, RealNetworks apparently hasn’t (yet) completely discarded PlaysForSure, because non-’R’ Sansas (as well as PlaysForSure-based players from other manufacturers) are (at least as of today) still listed as being supported by the Rhapsody To Go service variant.

As long as RealNetworks continues supporting PlaysForSure, I’m ok, although I’ll unfortunately, inevitably, be paying a few more bucks per month to RealNetworks than I did to Yahoo! If and when Rhapsody’s library goes completely proprietary, though, I’ll probably move over to the Zune Marketplace. I daresay Microsoft’s note likely to license the DRM scheme of its competitor, so my ability to stream subscription music to my Xbox 360s would cease under such a scenario. I might still be able to use my two SoundBridges (which are both upstairs) in a Rhapsody DRM world, depending on Roku Labs’ licensing status and plans, but not in the living room downstairs (although I could always ‘push’ the tunes to there instead). Conversely, if I migrated to Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace, it’s probably a safe bet that I’d be able to access the content on the Xbox 360s And, since PlaysForSure players are able to indirectly access Zune Marketplace content after it’s imported into Windows Media Player, I suspect that all of my hardware would continue to work in a Zune DRM-based ecosystem..

…at least to some degree, that is. Since Sandisk makes the Sansa Connect, and since Sandisk already has license access to RealNetworks’ proprietary DRM, that particular player’s firmware could easily migrate from Yahoo! Music Unlimited to Rhapsody. However, since Microsoft has Wi-Fi-inclusive players of its own, I daresay the Sansa Connect’s not likely to support direct Zune Marketplace access.

Time to sell my Sansa Connects on Ebay, and pick up a flash memory-based Zune instead? Probably, eventually. DRM sure complicates matters, doesn’t it?