PlaysForSure

» see playsforsure.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i was reading hardware reviews of the early portable players in '04 and '05 and the playsforsure logo was on basically every iriver or creative box, plus most of the asian also-ran players that were not an ipod. the logo was a small green sticker on the back of the device packaging. the marketing pitch was a one-line story, this device plays files from these stores. that promise was the entire reason microsoft built the certification program. apple's itunes store was the only place that sold music for an ipod, with fairplay drm that no other player supported. microsoft wanted to be the opposite of that, an ecosystem where the store and the player came from different companies but worked together.

the certification program had two halves. on the hardware side, microsoft certified a device if it could play windows media audio files with windows media drm correctly. iriver and creative were the loud launch partners. sandisk plus samsung came in later, with nokia joining on the phone side, plus a long tail of asian-oem players that nobody outside of forum-tier hardware fans tracked carefully. on the store side, microsoft certified a music store if its drm-encoded files would re-authorize cleanly on those devices. yahoo music unlimited was certified at launch. napster to go was certified. msn music was certified, which mattered because microsoft was running both ends of that one specific pairing.

back then. by 2006 the ecosystem had a few hundred certified products on each side and the playsforsure brand was on shelf-talkers in every us electronics store. it looked for a stretch like the windows-and-pc playbook applied to music players, with microsoft owning the platform layer and oems competing on hardware while the music industry got a non-apple distribution channel. that was the pitch. then microsoft killed it.

the zune launched november 14 2006 on a different drm scheme that did not honor the playsforsure handshake. zune tracks would not play on certified third-party hardware. msn music tracks would not play on zune. honestly, microsoft had built the alternate ecosystem and then opened a second front against it from inside the same company. the playsforsure logo was quietly retired by late '07. for some reason it was rebranded as "certified for windows vista" before being dropped entirely.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the technical layer was windows media drm 10. when you bought a song from msn music or napster, the file came down as a protected wma. when you plugged a certified player into windows media player on your pc, the player would request a license from microsoft's keyserver to authorize that file for that device. the license could be re-issued if you got a new player or reformatted your computer. that license-reissue path is what the keyservers existed to provide.

the consumer experience was rough even before microsoft turned on it. drm authorization regularly failed for reasons nobody could diagnose, the device would refuse to play a track that had played the day before. the forum complaints from '05 and '06 are full of people reauthorizing the same file three times in a row to make a sync work. the joke nickname "playsnotsure" came from those threads and stuck. anyway, the structural problem was that the drm layer made every legitimate user a little more annoyed than they had been before they paid for the music.

~ the cracks ~

this part you had to be in the us for, and i was not. the brand was already weak when zune launched. the second-half collapse came in april '08 when microsoft sent the msn music customer letter announcing that the drm keyservers would go offline august 31 of that year. the practical effect was that anyone who had bought msn music tracks under the playsforsure regime would lose the ability to reauthorize those files after that date. all your purchased music would stop working on any new device.

the tech press reaction was loud enough that microsoft posted a follow-up two months later extending keyserver support to at least 2011. the half-walkback did not fix the trust problem. the drm category as a whole was already collapsing by then. apple had announced itunes plus, the drm-free track tier, in '07. amazon mp3 launched without drm in september '07. by '09 most of itunes was drm-free aac and the major labels had agreed to ship most of the catalog without protection. playsforsure was an artifact of a model the industry was retreating from anyway.

~ what got buried with it ~

the cultural memory of playsforsure now is almost entirely as a cautionary tale rather than a product. the eff and consumer-rights groups had been arguing for years that drm-protected purchases were rentals dressed up as ownership. the msn music keyserver letter made that argument unarguable in the eyes of the mainstream press for a few months in '08. that argument carried directly into the drm-free push that followed, even if microsoft was not the only force pushing the industry that direction.

the hardware partners moved on with mixed outcomes. iriver shifted to non-microsoft drm and then to streaming hardware in korea. creative quietly retreated from the player business as the iphone took the market. sandisk's sansa line continued for a few years as the budget non-ipod option. nokia rolled its certified devices into the broader symbian music story. nobody continued the playsforsure brand. by '12 the entire conversation about portable music had moved to phones and streaming, where drm was a server-side enforcement problem and the certification-logo era was already historical.

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