Wal-Mart has downsized its decision to shutter its DRM key servers after transitioning to a DRM-free music store. Wal-Mart Music customers began receiving e-mails today from the company saying that feedback from customers has prompted Wal-Mart to keep the DRM servers online a bit longer, allowing people to continue transferring their purchased music to other computers as usual. Wal-Mart did not indicate, however, that the servers would remain online forever, and it continued to advise customers to burn their music to CDs.

"Based on feedback from our customers, we have decided to maintain our digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time," reads the e-mail sent to customers. "While our customer support team is available to assist you with any issues, we continue to recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you insure access to them from any personal computer at any time in the future."

The decision comes only a couple of weeks after Wal-Mart originally announced that it planned to turn off the servers, and only a day after the servers were scheduled to be pulled offline. Wal-Mart had fully transitioned away from DRM in February of this year, meaning that its previously-DRMed music was no longer important to the company. Customers, if they had purchased the copy-protected WMA files, would no longer be able to authorize new computers or operating systems to play the music once the servers went offline.

If this all sounds familiar as a pop song, it should. Both Yahoo Music and MSN Music have tried to pull the same stunt, almost leaving old customers out in the cold after the companies moved on to greener pastures. However, both decided later to help out their customers—MSN decided to leave its DRM key servers up until 2011, and Yahoo gave coupons to its music captives so that they could re-purchase their music, DRM-free, through Rhapsody.

The decisions made by all three of these music retailers—Wal-Mart, Yahoo, and MSN—shows that, if enough customers complain about the issue on the Internet, companies will listen. Back in the day, writing a letter might net you a form response along with a coupon, and that's only for the hardy souls who bothered with pen and ink and paper and envelope and stamp. Today, the Internet lets customers tweet their bile to the world at a moment's notice, actually yielding results in the process.