Shandrew's News and Reviews

Covering the best of what the mainstream is missing

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Location: Sunnyvale, CA

September 28, 2006

Yahoo! Music sells album in mp3 format

For the first time, a major internet music site, Yahoo! Music, has made a deal to sell tracks from a mainstream music label in mp3 format. Yahoo has been pushing labels to offer tracks in open, freely copyable formats though until now has had little luck negotiating deals with the music licensing cartel to offer music in mp3 format.

Let's hope that other companies sign on to this, and stop selling music with useless, painful DRM restrictions. I wonder if part of what drove Yahoo to do this is that Microsoft appears to be abandoning their own DRM-crippled music format in their new portable music player called Zune, thus leaving companies that have adopted the format unable to support the Zune.

Remember, we are only a few years away from the time when 5-10 terabytes will be a standard storage size for computer disks. At that point, everyone will be able to load the entire music library of virtually any current music site. Undoubtedly every college student will have every track, legal or not. This will not be stopped; human nature is to share culture.