Imagine if you lost all your CDs. Not suddenly, as in a theft, but gradually, as if to decay or rust – it never sleeps, you know.

Or
imagine an even more gradual musical death, if you suddenly had to
decide which CD players would be able to play your CDs. If you chose
your current car, they wouldn't work in your next one. If you picked
the stereo in your living room, they wouldn't play in the bedroom. This
sounds ridiculous – but it's also realistic.

Last week, Ars Technica reported that Microsoft will stop supporting its PlaysForSure music format this summer.
This doesn't mean that the music will stop playing – just that they
will only play on a computer, and operating system, that has already
been chosen to work with them. And fans can burn their songs to CD and
then re-rip them as MP3s, but that's not anyone's idea of fun. Given
the built-in obsolescence of technology, that means the clock has
started ticking. The irony that this is happening to a format called PlaysForSure has not been lost on anyone.

At
this point, most of you are probably wondering what exactly
PlaysForSure is. A little history: Back before the introduction of the
Zune, Microsoft supported a DRM music format called PlaysForSure, which
it sold from the MSN Music Store, as well as several other sites. Its
plans were ambitious – MTV got involved, as did several MP3 makers. But
it could never compete with iTunes. Like Microsoft's operating systems,
it was inelegant and hard to use. Microsoft itself stopped selling
songs in this format when it introduced the Zune, effectively competing
with its corporate partners. Since then, customers have been wondering
how long the company would support the format. Now they know.

Ars Technica and other sites argue that this limits a customer's rights
to play the music he purchased. But that depends on what those rights
are. When people pay a dollar to buy a song online, most believe that
they're doing just that: buying a song. A lawyer would say that they're
buying the rights to play a song in a certain set of ways on a certain
set of devices. The same goes for CDs. Record companies say they're
selling a piece of plastic but consumers believe they're buying music
they can use however they like. Technically, some of this is settled in
the legal jargon in online sites. But it's unreasonable to expect every
teenager who buys a single to wade through pages of legal jargon.

At
this point, the issue is practically settled, as the major record
labels are slowly abandoning DRM. In the meantime, though, anyone who
sells music should be required to make sure it keeps playing.
Otherwise, why will people keep buying it?