Retail giant Wal-Mart have notified customers of their digital-music store that, come Oct. 9, they won't be able to play any files purchased before August 2007 and many of those purchased before February, thanks to those files being protected by the Microsoft-crafted digital-rights management software
Playsforsure. In the wake of Microsoft stopping development and support of that nasty little bit of DRM, Wal-Mart switched its entire digital-music store to MP3s in February. So now, the higher-ups there have decided that the time is right to shut off the "license key" that allows those files to be played by people who
purchased rented them. The Bentonville-issued missive to customers after the jump.
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Idolator
Retail giant Wal-Mart has had a change of heart (or at least a panic attack about bad PR in a time of economic crisis): After threatening to shut off its online music store's DRM servers on Oct. 9—you know, yesterday—it's decided to keep those servers up and running, so people who bought protected audio files before the whole enterprise switched over to an MP3-only operation can keep on listening to those songs without burning them to a CD. And it's all because of "customer feedback"! Not to mention the idea that asking people to truck out and buy CD-Rs ($14.88 for a 50-disc spindle!)) in the current economic moment clashes a bit with the company's overall "always low prices, even though the result is basically you shopping yourself out of a job" mandate. [Engadget]
Hypebot is wondering if the stalled effort to make more digital-music stores' catalog free of digital rights management is the fault of the stores or the major record labels. I have a third theory: The roadblock isn't really because of either side digging in its heels: It's because the "issue" of whether or not music should be free of DRM is one that doesn't really matter to 95% of consumers, as long as they can get the songs they've already purchased online to work on their computer/portable device, and so pouring a lot of money into a "solution" for this overhyped-by-the-tech-nerds problem isn't really as high a priority as, say, 
