If you woke up this morning worried about what Yahoo! is planning to do for its Music Store customers who are about to be left in the lurch with its DRM server shut-down, have no fear. Yahoo! has announced that it will offer customers coupons or refunds for those songs you bought. Basically, you'll get a coupon that you can use at RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody download service. Their songs, of course, are DRM-free. For those of you who have "serious problems with this arrangement" (their words, not ours), refunds will be available. The servers go down on September 30, so start combing your collections, kids.

[Thanks, JC]

Hey, both of you Yahoo! Music Store customers, listen up. Just hours after Yahoo! affirmed that it would be powering down its DRM servers, along comes a spokesperson to alleviate any worries that you two will get screwed in all of this. According to Carrie Davis, customers "will be compensated for whatever they paid for the music," and she continued on to state that Yahoo "had not yet decided what exactly it would do, but it would take care of its customers." Some of the possible options include getting cash back for the money spent on tracks or receiving MP3 versions of the jams sans DRM (we'd take the former, thanks). Depressingly, there doesn't seem to be a definitive time table laid out just yet for the restitution process.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited (and its customers) is the latest victim of the digital media shakeout. However, unlike the shutdown of Sony's Connect service which left customers stranded with DRM-laden tracks, Yahoo has struck a deal to send its existing subscription customers to the PlaysForSure-friendly Rhapsody music service from RealNetworks. The shift will occur sometime in "the first half" of 2008 and leave Yahoo Music Unlimited's payment plans and music libraries in tact for customers "for a limited time." Eventually, Yahoo's legacy customers will be required to sign up at Rhapsody's relatively higher rates of $12.99 per month (Yahoo charged $8.99 per month or as little as $5.99 per month for a year paid in full). So, do you still think that the subscription model is a good thing? Just wait, the shake-out has only begun.

Update: To be clear, Yahoo Music will continue to offer streaming audio, music videos, web radio and other advertising-supported music offerings while integrating Rhapsody into its online portal. Only the subscription service is being shut down.

At this point, WiFi-equipped DAPs aren't completely novel, but they're still novel enough to command a good deal of attention -- especially when they're coming from companies like Sandisk through collaborations with Zing. In fact, the $249 Sansa Connect bears a truly striking resemblance (both physically and in user experience) to the reference device Zing was showing off last year -- much more so than its distant cousin from the same Zing drafting board, Sirius' Stiletto. Though the Sansa Connect obiviously loses the Stiletto's satellite radio capabilites, it dominates the Stiletto (and the Zune, for that matter) in its effective use of 802.11 airwaves. Why most manufacturers have yet to pick up on the WiFi formula for this class of devices, we don't understand, but hey folks, it's easy: give us streaming, easy PC-free downloading, and firmware updates over the air. We're all awash in hotspots at this point, so let's take full advantage, yeah? The Connect is tied to Yahoo! Music Unlimited for its subscription download model and streaming radio, and we've gotta say, a WiFi DAP really brings the model into its own. It almost trivializes the need for serious storage in the device -- this one makes do with 4GB plus microSD expansion -- because you can get literally any music in Yahoo's catalog whenever you have a data connection handy. All of Yahoo's features carry over, too: ratings can be saved from the Connect, album art is downloaded in real time, and you've even got Messenger on here. All of LAUNCHcast's stations are available to stream, and of course, you can build your own station based on personal tastes. And for users of other services that employ secure WMA, rest easy: you'll be able to pull your songs into Yahoo Music Jukebox (or, if you subscribe to Unlimited, just grab the song again if you're so inclined). We tested this with URGE and it worked like a champ.