Interesting gimmicks the pay-for play online music sites come up with
 

http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story...html#story-sta

As long as you pay, you can listen. The minute you stop paying, the files are locked down by digital encryption, turning them into unplayable gibberish.


The RealOne software uses "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that limits how the music can be used. For instance, the downloads can only be played on the same computer, using the RealOne player. None of the songs can be burned onto a CD for playing in your home stereo or your car.

Now here's the best part. Each downloaded tune can only be played for 30 days; at the end of that time, the digital rights system locks it up.

Want to listen again? Then you have to renew access to the file, and doing so counts against your next month's 100 downloads. In other words, you can only have a total of 100 RealOne songs on your machine at any given time. There's no way to build up a library of hundreds of tunes -- the system forbids it.

The fresh weekly Download.com figures suggest that the music fans know pretty well what works and what does not work when it comes to getting good music:

RealOne Player : 7,506 downloads in a week
P2P clients: 3,000,000 downloads in a week

- tg ;)

You know, I wouldn't mind paying $.10 a song if I knew that it went to the musician because then they'd have incentive to release their songs online rather than being forced by their record labels. But once I buy a song I don't want to pay for it again next month, I want to keep the song forever and listen to it whenever and however I want. I know I'm not the only person saying these things, I'm just bewildered that these music "services" can ignore their customers like this.