Be careful of the online music market, Yahoo! Music ripped-off thousands of consumers with the aqusition of MMJB

With the Christmas holidays right around the corner, Many folks will be wondering what to purchase the younger folks in their lives…. Gift cards to music download sites would seem to be the perfect gift. It would allow the recipient to purchase the Artist and song of their choice. But before you do, be aware there is be a down side to the market. Do your research and only purchase, gift cards to music sites that offer NON DRM(Digital Rights Management) downloads …..Case in Point Record industry watchdog RIAA Sat back and did nothing when music download titan Yahoo!  Ripped off thousands of users who  legitimately and legally purchased music via the Musicmatch Juke box portal. Yahoo, purchased Musicmatch for $160 million cash in 2004. http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1181.html

All of this purchased music was encoded with the DRM Digital Rights Management system suggested by RIAA to help prevent piracy.  So all of the purchases had to be authorized by a Musicmatch server to be able to be played, this worked out just fine until YAHOO purchased them and turned off the Authorization servers. So even though you might have a copy of the music it is, copy and play protected so you can’t listen to it. Yahoo was apparently aware of this issue because the Musicmatch authorization server was redirected to a yahoo server!

So all of the music we purchased thinking ,we were buying a single CD equivalent Is now nonexistent and just taking up room on our hard disk Drives and is NOT playable!! Complaints to RIAA and Yahoo have fallen on deaf ears