Digital Home Thoughts: Flaky DRM=Bad News for Music Fans

"I'm the sort of guy that the music industry should love--I not only listen to a lot of music, I pay for a lot of music. And I don't have a problem with the basic notion of Digital Rights Management that puts some limits on what you can do with downloaded music. The implementation of DRM...well, that's another story. I've been trying to get Napster to work on my home desktop, and I'm feeling like its DRM--which is based on Microsoft's technology--should be called Digital Rights Mangling. Every time I try to stream a song, I get a message about a required Windows Media security update, but pressing OK does nothing. When I try to download music instead of streaming it, I get a license server error. Bottom line is, I haven't listened to a single song yet."

I am totally inclined to agree with the author here. I have had basically the same miserable experience that he seems to be having. On my Tablet PC, DRM music works just fine but it doesn't appear to work anywhere else and is generally buggy, even in its error messages. So while, when it does work, the service is nifty, I can see why Apple's music service is winning. Their Fairplay DRM seems to just work.