When an e-mail lands in your inbox with the subject line, "Important Information About Your Walmart.com Digital Music Purchases," you can have confidence that what follows will be bad news.

Wal-Mart, never wanting to underperform expectations, delivered again this weekend with an e-mail message to customers warning them its digital rights management servers would be shut off in just over a week. Those foolish or unlucky enough to purchase DRM-laced music from the store now need to burn all of their tracks to audio CDs—which, fortunately, they can buy at Wal-Mart.

The change comes, not because Wal-Mart is shuttering its music store, but because it has now fully transitioned away from DRM. Since February of this year, the site has offered only unprotected MP3 files, and it's not keen on keeping the DRM servers up beyond October 9.

The whole sad and predictable announcement (similar fates have befallen Yahoo and MSN music programs) only highlights the absurdity of the entire DRM system. "If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD," says the e-mail. "By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free."

In other words, the DRM was never anything more than a huge inconvenience that everyone could bypass if they wanted, but now that the music industry has seen the light and allowed DRM-free downloads, consumers have to go through the entire DRM circumvention procedure themselves just to make sure their songs actually play in the future (DRMed songs will continue to play on the original PC until the operating system is reinstalled).

When consumers bypass DRM on their own accord, it's bad, and content owners get laws like the DMCA passed to stop them; when music stores don't feel like running their own key servers anymore, though, suddenly consumers are all told exactly how to go about bypassing the DRM. It's all patently absurd and inconvenient (you lose metadata, in most cases, when songs are burned to CDs), but then again, we've come to expect the absurd and inconvenient when DRM is involved.