TechCrunch was one of the bloggers who recently were able to do a sit down with Bill Gates and one of the questions they asked was concerning DRM and the viability of it. The advice given by Bill Gates was:

“People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then.”

I think even RIAA may have some issues with his advice. But the point here is DRM is makes the online purchasing experience a royal pain in the butt, and is a major reason why consumers haven't embraced online music fully. It causes a major inconvenience by the lack of a standard DRM that could work across all players on the market.

Many people just burn the songs they purchase to CD and rip them to MP3 format so they do not have to be inconvenienced by backing up license files,  losing their rights in the event of a machine rebuild, or purchasing another player and it not supporting the same DRM scheme. Things definitely need to change in order for online music to take off, hopefully with this being recognized by Bill Gates more focus will be placed on reassessing DRM.