While some will say that the CD-ROM is not a long term medium for the storage of audio tracks, I believe that it is. Just the other day I popped in a Weird Al CD from ages ago (The Food Album) and it worked flawlessly despite a couple of scratches. No DRM, no licensing, no restrictions of any kind. I paid for the CD once and have (virtually) unlimited ability to listen to the songs.

This probably doesn’t shock you, and it shouldn’t because most of the world purchases music in CD form, or has at some point. The point is to remind you of how nice things were when the CD was the powerhouse. Now that virtual marketplaces have cropped up all over the place (iTunes, Zune, Napster, Walmart, Buy.com, Amazon, et al) people are jumping on board without first thinking about the problems. What happens when a store shuts down? What happens when an artist stops selling their work on the marketplace? For many this will spell doom: I bought an album by CCR on the Zune marketplace and within a month I had no license to play the songs because the tracks weren’t available for sale anymore. Wait, what? That’s right – they weren’t selling something that I already bought so I couldn’t use it. Could you imagine if your car went *poof* and disappeared when the newer model came out?

Similarly, I recently installed Windows 7 RTM and was redownloading my purchased music from the Zune marketplace when I noticed that some were erroring out. The reason? Apparently I had downloaded some of the songs too many times! But don’t get to thinking that the Zune marketplace is the only one with problems like this. The iTunes for a long time had DRM songs which immediately brings any problems associated with DRM. Just ask anyone who bought DRM songs from Walmart only to be asked to back them up when the DRM servers were shutdown.

So what is the solution? Sadly there isn’t one, although the Walmart choice doesn’t seem too bad. If you have burning rights on your downloaded tracks, burn them so you can rip them back at a later date if need be. But this begs the question, why by from a virtual marketplace if you need the physical CD?