Problem re-acquiring DRM licenses from MusicMatch. Help!

[beavercleaver]

Hoping someone can help with this little dilemma. Several years ago I purchased a sizeable collection of music from MusicMatch. The songs were in the .WMA format.

Yahoo! purchased MusicMatch and the service became Yahoo! Music Jukebox. Well, none of my purchased music would play in it and I was forced to reacquire my licenses from Yahoo.

Now Yahoo! Music Jukebox has gone out of business and converted to a subscription service called Rhapsody. Of course none of my music will play again.

I contacted Yahoo! support about getting the licenses and the said, "we do not support that feature anymore you need to subscribe to Rhapsody." I have already paid for my music and I don't want to pay $15 a month to listen to it!

So that brings me to my current problem. I'm a newb when it comes to this DRM removal stuff but my goal is to remove the DRM from the songs I've purchased so I can convert the songs to MP3's like the rest of my collection. I tried using FairUse4WM 1.3 but I run into two problems WMP runs into a 404 dead site when trying to "reacquire" the licenses. or many times WMP will crash altogether with a windows error report. Are the licenses resident somewhere on my computer or were they accessed every time from Yahoo? Can any one advise me on the solution?

The whole DRM thing seems to be a big scam. It doesn't stop piracy, but puts lots of restrictions onto users:

• You can't play legally purchased content on any device you have
• You are forced to use Windows only
• In many cases you can't play legally purchased content after re-installing an OS, system crash, system upgrade,...

Even large companies like Yahoo can leave their business without caring about customers. And there were much more smaller companies that died leaving people with unplayble content they have paid for.

Unfortunately you can't remove DRM before getting working licenses. So if you can't re-acquire them, you can't make your files DRM free. The biggest problem is that people realize it when it is too late.

What you can do?

• Spread the word about DRM removal software
  Tell your friends about your story. Tell them to remove DRM from all their DRM protected content, inclusing music, movies, TV shows, TV episodes, educational videos, ebooks,...
  e-mail your friends, contact them via Facebook and other social networking web-sites, create forum and blog posts.
  
• Vote against DRM protected content. Use services that offer DRM-free music, video,... Or at least remove DRM protection after getting any DRM protected content.
• Do not use any Yahoo services