A few months ago, MSN shut down its music service. It was called, creatively, “MSN Music.” Microsoft wanted to consolidate its music services around the Zune and a new music service called the “Zune Marketplace.” Because the company had the music it sold people DRM’ed within an inch of its life, the shutting down of the store made the customers’ hold on their music iffy.

DRM, which stands for “digital rights management,” means that there is secret programming inside the digital products you buy that gives the company that sold it to you various kinds of control over them even after they are purchased.

You can imagine the use being innocuous. There’s nothing wrong with renting a movie for a modest fee, downloading it to your computer, and then having it disappear after a week.

But there are obvious potentials for abuse from two sources—Microsoft and the music industry—that have never been good at customer care.

So anyway, people who’d been buying (not renting or subscribing to) music from the MSN store were told earlier this year that the store was going away. More than that, Microsoft also told people that, basically, it was not going to put any more resources into doing the behind-the-scenes housekeeping that kept the DRM going after August.

It didn’t mean that the music was going to go away from customers right away; just that they wouldn’t be able, most importantly, to move the music to new computers. (In Microsoft Corporatespeak, the company said it would no longer “authorize” the new computers.)

Now we’re seeing a version of the same thing happen with Yahoo music.

LA Times blog on the story here:

This afternoon, Yahoo alerted customers of its erstwhile downloadable music store that it would no longer provide support after Sept. 30 […]. The upshot: starting Oct. 1, said customers won’t be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo won’t be providing any more keys to the songs’ DRM wrappers. But hey, they can always buy MP3 versions from Yahoo’s new partner Rhapsody!

Among the many consumer-unfriendly things about this is that the companies involved don’t even bother to couch what they are doing in plain terms; all of a sudden one company has to “authorize” your computer. Yahoo’s note to customers is even worse:

After the Store closes, Yahoo! will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for music purchased from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and Yahoo! will no longer be able to authorize song playback on additional computers.

“Retrieval of license keys”!

There’s a way in which all of this is good, in heightening-the-contradictions terms. Each time customers are screwed over in this fashion, there’s a whole new class of people who’ve been given an object lesson in both DRM and also the way these companies play the game.

Back to Microsoft. After the company started getting screamed at for the MSN Store’s shuttering, the company backed down and said it wouldn’t start screwing over its former customers for another year and a half. One of the Cnet bloggers talked with the Microsoft guy who was responsible for the debacle. He makes a point that, if you think about it for a second, makes a little bit of sense:

[M’soft marketing director Rob] Bennett defended Microsoft. He said the company never wanted DRM on its songs.

“Had we had the ability to deliver DRM-free tracks at the time, we absolutely would have done that,” Bennett said. “We talked to the labels at the time about that. As a company, we have continued to push for this. Zune has a subset in their catalog of DRM-free MP3s. Now, the industry is making progress. The labels are understanding the downside of DRM when its used the way they wanted to use it, they end up punishing the users who bought music legally more than those who want to circumvent the system.”

… but if you think about it for more than a second, you think—wait, but wasn’t Microsoft the company that’s been aggressively marketing DRM to Big Content all these years?

What these moves force consumers to do in the event is the final insult. They have to burn their DRM’ed songs to a normal CD … and then rip them back into their computers as MP3s. The point being that the DRM offered the companies involved no real protection in the first place.