Yahoo Music Online…Going Offline

I don't know about you, but I must confess I have never-ever used Yahoo! Music. Well, that doesn't mean it's something wrong with it, just that I usually know what I want, and I like buying music CDs or DVDs, instead of paying to download lossy-encoded music files. After being released as "LAUNCH" by LAUNCH Media, purchased by Yahoo! in 2001 for no less that $12 million, Yahoo! Music grew up to be the number on online music site in March 2007, when considering the audience reach and total time spent. Unfortunately, it's not like that anymore...

If you clicked the Yahoo! Music link above, you probably noticed already that you're being automatically redirected to new.music.yahoo.com, the new website for the service released last month. Despite this recent design overhaul, it seems Yahoo! Music will be turned to nothing more but a memory pretty soon, so if you're having DRM-protected files from them, you should get ready to burn some discs with them, since you may need one day to change your computer, and you don't want to lose all those nice tunes, I am sure of that!

According to an email to the Yahoo! Music Store customers sent out on the 23rd of July, its DRM license key servers will go down on the 30th of September, but while MSN Music is down, and Microsoft promised to keep the DRM authorization servers up and running through 2011, Yahoo! is sealing the coffin of its music store pretty fast.

In the end, the anti-DRM movement may have a reason to go have a beer and celebrate, because it seems the target of their hate is going to slowly fade away, and become only a gray page of the IT history.