Microsoft closing down their MSN Music license servers

Microsoft closing down their MSN Music license servers

Software giant Microsoft has some more bad news for their loyal customers.

The company has now announced that they would soon close down their MSN Music license servers.

These servers are required by the people who bought music from the now-dead MSN Music digital media store to authenticate their computers to play the music files.

Microsoft would close down these servers by the end of this summer season.

They notified the customers in an email message saying:

As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers. You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.

MSN Music store was replaced by the Zune Marketplace which supported the Zune player launched in competition to the Apple iPods.

Customers with music purchased from MSN Music store can burn the songs to an Audio CD if they want to preserve them for future. But that is still a bad solution as the music ripped from these CDs would be of lower quality.