Why current implementations of DRM suck for digital music

I've upgraded my machine again (you'll see more on this in a later article/post where I talk about my experiences with some cool new hardware) and had to migrate my files over to the new machine from the old machine.

I was a bit surprised when I tried to play my MP3s and found a few songs that woudn't play.  When I checked, I realized that these were WMA files that I'd purchased from PeerImpact and MSN Music.  I purcased these songs from these services through some free coupons received with the purchase of an MP3 player or bundled with a software install.

"Oh no big deal,...  there must be a way to activate these song files on my new PC, right?"  Yes, there is... 

But it doens't work worth ***.

Each of the music files purchased through MSN Music attempted to launch a seperate browser window to activate the file.  These browser windows ran into a perpetual refresh that ran my new beefy system into a 100% CPU usage hell.  Eventually I caught up to the numerous browser windows opened by this process and killed each of them.

The MSN music files remained unplayable.

Each of the PeerImpact music files gave me a helpful Windows Media dialog that told me to go to the website and download PeerImpact.  OK, no problem, I'll just remove that when I'm done...  So I installed it, went through the activation process on the files again.  And it didn't do anything. 

The PeerImpact music files remained unplayable.

Screw this.  I deleted the songs.  I've already spent more time than it's worth to try to get them running on my new machine, and I'm probably in something like the 99.99% percentile of technical capabilities of people buying music online, and I got fed up trying to get this to work.  What hope do mom and pops have?

These are 20 songs out of my 7-800 songs that I've either ripped off of my CD collection, or purchased legally online from sites that don't cripple their songs with DRM.  So I'll just go download these songs off of BitTorrent or something.  I'm licensed to use the songs so I'll feel no remorse.

The bottom line is... never again will I buy music or video online where the vendor applies DRM to it.  If it's not as easy as taking a DVD from my DVD player to my desktop PC, then it's not worth my time.