Yahoo sells music subcsription service to Real

Yahoo has apparently sold its music service to Real. This is obviously unrelated to the MS bid for Yahoo but as a subscriber to Yahoo’s music service it’s sad to see. It does beg the question whether music subscription services are heading for bit bucket. With the advent of DRM-free music being available I would tend to think that the convenience of DRM-free outweighs the subscription service convenience of having the 4 majors’ catalogs available. DRM will always have an associated hassle factor and that’s hard to get away from nor will it be solved any time soon.