So the Post basically bought you an album? Nice gig you got.

I see how you would have to buy music to review a music store but by keeping the music after aren't you in effect getting extra value from your employment at the post? Isn't that taxable?

Thanks Bob. Never even thought of this angle before.

CDs are still the way to go, especially when they're discounted to $10 or less on Amazon or other Web sites. Better sound quality, and absolutely no DRM or file backup issues to worry about (thanks to the Sony XCP/Media Max debacle).

I naively bought a musicmatch jukebox subscription way back when because it was one of the bundle of programs loaded on to my (at the time) brand new Dell, which was 'optimized' for audio/video.

Even back then, MusicMatch was a mess. And I quickly realized that they were more interested in sales than in service. I stopped using it and used Windows Media Player services instead.

Years went by. I became an iPod/iTunes user. Then the Dell died. I got an iMac.

Damned if a couple of weeks ago my credit card statement showed a charge to renew my MusicMatch subscription. That's when I remembered I had once (ONCE!) used it about 6 years ago.

I went all over the website trying to find out how to unsubscribe. That's how I found out that Yahoo had bought it. But nowhere was there any subscribe/unsubscribe links, much less any customer service contact information.

I finally found a 1-800 number buried in their legal disclaimer information, called that, and got the service cancelled and charged removed.

Basically, it was crappy from wire to wire. Yahoo wasted it's money, and I feel sorry for anybody that tried to make MusicMatch their primary music service.

How ironic that Apple's introduction of a workable DRM strategy with the iTunes Music Store was largely responsible for stopping (slowing?) the erosion of the retail music industry due to piracy, yet now those who benfitted the most from Apple's leadership are using DRM against Apple to reduce Apple's influence over electronic distribution of music.

The next edition of Webster's Dictionary should have a picture of record label executives next to their definitions for the words "greed" and "ingrate."

Basically, it was crappy from wire to wire. Yahoo wasted it's money, and I feel sorry for anybody that tried to make MusicMatch their primary music service.

Posted by: NW DC | July 25, 2008 1:56 PM

Don't feel sorry for me, just hug me and show me some empathy. :-)

Thankfully, I didn't buy any music from Music Match or Yahoo!whatever they called it when they bought it. As I mentioned in Rob's chat last week, I thought it was a pretty good program until Yahoo bought it and futzed with it enough to turn it into crap. I was even stupid enough to pay for lifetime upgrades when it was Music Match...idiot. Lesson learned, I hope.

I have never purchased any DRM music for exactly the reason you describe in this article. Unfortunately, I own some DRM audiobooks from Audible.com. What a horrible company and service. They try to trap you into paying a monthly fee. If you try to unsubscribe, they won't let you over the web, they keep insisting you have to call their customer support number. If you keep attempting to unsubscribe via the web, eventually, after 3 or 4 tries, it will let you, but then they offer you a "lite" subscription that only bills you $10 a year instead of $15 a month.
Pointlessly angering your customers and trying to trap them into expensive plans is NOT good business.

I have posted this in so many places now, I can not keep count. Yahoo! emasculated MM10, which was a great piece of software, especially for syncing a large number of files, where WMP9 choked, and for ID-3 tagging.

We no longer need MM10, especially in Vista, WMP11 does a really great job.

But we loved MM10,. we had paid keys for it, somebody at yahoo! know where the code is, and Yahoo! should do with MM10. the real MM10, what AOL did with Netscape, which resulted in Mozilla Suite, now SeaMonkey Suite, and, importantly, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Develop MM10 into MM11, and it would be a worthy competitor to RealPlayer 11 and Winamp 5.5.4.

Obviously, we do not need MM11, but, hey, MM10 was stolen and we were screwed.

Why would anyone agree to a subscription based music service? Once the service is up, poof, there goes the music. I don't know much about the Yahoo/MM system. It sounds like it's modeled after the iTunes format, where one can burn it to an MP3 CD and rip it back to their computer.

I would agree with one of the above posters about the greed of the record industry. They're still limiting iTunes to DRM while they've allowed, Amazon, Rhapsody, and Napster to sell MP3 format songs, in order to mitigate Apples influence. It's very malicious. If they succeed in making iTunes irrelevant I'm sure they will shutter down the MP3 stores and bring back to DRMs. B@st@rds!

I too was a MusicMatch fan and have previously decried it's bashing in this space... or was it the other space... anyway... When Yahoo! bought it, I knew it was the beginning of the end. They gutted it and made it unusable.

We bought a good 40 to 50 songs from them and sync'ed them with our Rios Nitrus MP3 players and were happy. Then Rio was chopped-up and sold and MusicMatch bought and sunk.

When Yahoo! announced that they were going to pull the plug on MusicMatch, I spent an entire weekend burning/ripping all the songs that we'd bought. I just numbered them and kept track of what was on them in a spreadsheet and then ripped them back to high bit rate MP3, Super-Tagged them, and added them back into MusicMatch. It was a grueling weekend, but I got it done and was done with it.

Our Music collection languished on our Linux Server in the basement of our old house and then in the attic office of our new house for nearly 2 years until my wife bought a Macbook Pro. I had shunned iTunes until that time, since it somehow interfered with MusicMatch when I installed it on my Windows machine; however, when she pulled-in all of the ripped MP3s off of the file system, my curiosity was peaked. I tried to use the iTunes album art feature and quickly found it to be pathetic in comparison to MusicMatch's SuperTagging.

It wasn't until I bought an Apple TV that I started using iTunes in earnest, since you have to have iTunes running on a machine with at least as much disk space as the Apple TV in order to manage the library of music, movies, TV shows, etc that you want to play on your Apple TV.

So, basically we jumped out of one walled-garden and into another... hopefully this walled-garden won't vanish into a sink hole like MusicMatch did... and hopefully I'll be able to de-DRM the stuff that we've bought on the Apple TV if it does.

No problem no worries .. simply convert the DRM music to MP3 and you're good to go .. forever!

I have never, will never, buy DRM protected music. I freely admit that I have downloaded music via peer-to-peer sharing software, with the personal caveat that I delete what I don't like and buy what I do like, on CD. My peer-to-peer activity allows me to fully preview music to see if it is worth my hard-earned money or not. I got so sick and tired of buying a $15 CD only to find ONE good track on the entire thing (Billy Thorpe's "Children of the Sun", anyone?). My CD collection has grown to over 400 in the last 10 years, the majority of which was prompted by my online acquisitions.

DRM protected media is a consumer black eye waiting to happen, and this article summed it up nicely when they pointed out the debacle that is the closing of the Yahoo music store. How many naive consumers are going to lose their purchases simply because they are consumers and not technophiles?

No DRM for me. I either get my music from emusic.com (the files there are NOT DRM protected) OR I go and buy my CD's.

emusic is great for more obscure, non mainstream artists, but the have music from every Genre there. Sometimes popular artists like Enya, and Paul Mcartney have stuff there as well.

Bob -- I have it on good authority that Pegoraro is a serial office-supply thief, having taken ballpoint pens home on three separate occasions between 1792 and 2006. Do you want to call the IRS, or shall I...?