Retail giant Wal-Mart have notified customers of their digital-music store that, come Oct. 9, they won't be able to play any files purchased before August 2007 and many of those purchased before February, thanks to those files being protected by the Microsoft-crafted digital-rights management software
Playsforsure. In the wake of Microsoft stopping development and support of that nasty little bit of DRM, Wal-Mart switched its entire digital-music store to MP3s in February. So now, the higher-ups there have decided that the time is right to shut off the "license key" that allows those files to be played by people who
purchased rented them. The Bentonville-issued missive to customers after the jump.
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Idolator
Hypebot is wondering if the stalled effort to make more digital-music stores' catalog free of digital rights management is the fault of the stores or the major record labels. I have a third theory: The roadblock isn't really because of either side digging in its heels: It's because the "issue" of whether or not music should be free of DRM is one that doesn't really matter to 95% of consumers, as long as they can get the songs they've already purchased online to work on their computer/portable device, and so pouring a lot of money into a "solution" for this overhyped-by-the-tech-nerds problem isn't really as high a priority as, say, 
