Last month, Wal-Mart announced its plans to shut down its DRM authorisation servers, which would mean that anyone who bought DRM crippled music from Wal-Mart would no longer be able to authorise the protected songs for playback on new devices or computers after the server shut-off date. However, after Wal-Mart received some feedback from its customers, it has now decided to reverse its decision and said that it would keep its DRM authorisation servers running "for the present time".
Despite Wal-Mart's decision to keep its servers running, they are still advising its customers to back-up their songs on recordable audio CD. Once songs are recorded to CD, they lose their copy protection and thus can be played on any equipment capable of playing audio CDs, including other PCs with no longer the need to contact an authorisation server.
Wal-Mart's original decision came just a year after it launched its DRM-free store. Its DRM-free store delivers music in the widely supported MP3 format, which is not subject to authorisation before it can be played back on new devices. Yahoo already received a lot of negative publicity over its decision to close its DRM servers. Now they have agreed to give customers coupons to replace their DRM-protected tracks.
While all 4 major labels are currently selling DRM-free tracks through various online stores, Universal Music Group has only agreed to sell DRM-free music up to January 2009 and has yet to decide on whether to continue selling DRM-free music after that point. The other major 3 don't seem to have any plans on whether to stop and make another decision after a certain period, although EMI is the only major label that sells DRM-free music through iTunes, the most popular music retailer.
