Great and impassioned article from Ian Rogers, who works for Yahoo! Music, on why he is not accepting any more customer-unfriendly schemes from the music industry. He’s an interesting guy who used to run Winamp.com. Now he is reflecting on the failure of Yahoo! Music:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience.

For a little historical perspective, see here for the same author’s more positive view, on the launch of Yahoo! Music in May 2005.

I feel I played my own small part in this. When I tried the Yahoo! Music service two and a half years ago, I was appalled by the way it installed and posted a blog article about it, which still gets occasional comments from frustrated users.

DRM is actually only part of the problem here. The other part is that apparently nobody other than Apple can write software that makes dealing with DRM-ed music half-way tolerable. Given how much is at stake, I find this extraordinary. It’s not clear to me how many of the issues are Microsoft’s fault, and how many down to third parties like Yahoo! or the BBC (see my comments on iPlayer, which also uses Microsoft DRM).

The point of interest now is whether the inherent disadvantages of DRM will be enough to unseat Apple from its market dominance with iTunes.