Inbox: Ever since the appearance of software allowing users to take a normal music CD and "burn" the tracks into the digital MP3 format, music has gone digital, writes Mike Butcher
The early part of the century saw the rise of Napster, a website that enabled people to share and download each other's MP3s for free. When the record industry killed it off through legal action, a harder-to-trace service appeared called Kazaa. That too was hammered by the lawyers, but today you will avail of its underlying technology every time you use the internet call software, Skype.
Since then, the music industry - with few exceptions - has done its best to try to stop the illegal downloading of music. Working with retailers, a layer of data known as digital rights management (DRM) has been smothered over almost all legitimately sold music.
The biggest online music store on the planet, Apple's iTunes, uses a DRM system known as FairPlay. This was the only way Apple could convince the record companies to turn music into digital files which could be stored by their thousand on iPods and other digital music players.
Apple operates an online store where you download the files to your PC, but other stores have sprung up in the last few years which operate a rental policy. This means you subscribe to the entire music store, conceivably accessing millions of tracks. So long as you keep paying, you keep listening. At the same time, you can buy and download tracks if you want to own them forever - at least in theory.
The dangers of hooking yourself up to a DRM-enabled music rental store, which could go bang at any moment, were highlighted this week with the news that Virgin Digital customers would lose all their music when the service is shut down next month.
Virgin Digital was a two-year-old Windows Media-based alternative to Apple iTunes, but it stopped selling one-off downloads last week. Next month, users' songs will no longer be playable, thanks to DRM imitations built into each and every track.
Virgin announced the move via an e-mail to customers last weekend.
So what can you do if you are a Virgin Digital customer? Well, one option is to try to back up the tracks on a hard drive which is not connected to the store. When the store disappears, the tracks may still work.
A more sure method of saving the tracks would be to try to burn them on to a music CD as audio files and then use software to re-import them on to your PC as MP3 files. Not an easy task where hundreds of albums are concerned.
Virgin gave no reason for the shutdown, but it is just the latest music store to be squeezed by the leading iTunes, Napster and "illegal" sites such as Russia's AllofMP3.com.
AllofMP3.com sells music containing no DRM restrictions, which means the songs would, in theory, play forever, for as little at seven cents a track.
The moral of the story? Check what your digital music store offers you in the event of it going out of business or you could face losing all of your music.
