Nokia music-related announcement on Wednesday

Surely the music store is dead in the water if it doesn't go DRM-free. I haven't touched it with a bargepole since I lost about three albums.

Dead in the water?

What a load of rubbish. I'm a techie so can understand the attraction of files being free of any kinds of rights management, but I'm not so sure that joe average cares so much so long as they can easily put the songs on their pc as well as their phone

Just to echo Dynite, I wonder if most DRM purchasers even realise they ARE buying a DRMed file.

If you look at the customer comments on Amazon for various music players, you'll see lots of people puzzled why tracks they bought from one company's store don't work on another company's player. A lot of people honestly don't realise that DRM means tracks can be locked to just one set of hardware.

DRM-free music is like open source software, it's better but it seems only a minority of people actually understand why it's better.

Buy or borrow the CD or dig it out of your collection, rip the tracks you want. Job done.

Dynite, even a normal consumer will understand the problems of DRM when the first songs stop working due to compability problems or license issues. And at some point, most people will face this. If not this year, in five years when devices and software change again.

I've downloaded just 20 songs from Nokia Music Store, and they don't play anymore from my home network storage disk (NAS). I was supposed to be able to transfer them to as many portable players and PCs I want, but it didn't work. Surprise, surprise.

Let's admit it. Nokia bought old-fashioned technology to build their Music Store. Even Microsoft itself does not trust in this Windows Media DRM anymore which Nokia is still using. Look at how Microsoft ended support for MSN Music and DRM servers. Too bad if you're their U.S. customer.

Amazon, Apple and other interesting players in the market are showing DRM limitations aren't necessary anymore.

However, subscription based services (like Spotify and Nokia's 10EUR/month streaming service) can be expected to have DRM in the future too. Even then they need to allow multi-platform support.

Thanks, ebo, you've said it all and it sounds as if your experiences were similar to mine. And nobody should under-estimate the anger you feel when you've paid money for something and it stops working. I get my music DRM-free from Amazon and Play.com now.