Imagine if you had a bedroom full of CDs and decided to buy a new player one day, only to discover that none of your albums would play on the new system. That is more or less what has happened to people in America who bought music downloads from Microsoft. Last month the company announced that from August 31 this year songs bought from MSN Music, its online music shop, would no longer be transferable to machines other than the ones the files were registered to.

This means that, come September, if you want to transfer songs from your main PC to a laptop or a new computer you haven’t registered, you won’t be able to. If your computer dies, your painstakingly assembled music collection dies with it.

The announcement goes against everything Microsoft – and others – has ever said about buying music downloads. It led customers to believe that the songs they bought were for life, whatever computers they owned now and in the future. Now Microsoft says if US consumers want to transfer them onto other computers they must do so before the end of summer. The tracks could still be backed up onto CDs but sound quality would suffer.

It is all down to the digital rights management (DRM) software that Microsoft has embedded in all its music downloads to combat illegal file-sharing. For DRM to work it needs a central computer to keep a live record of who has registered which songs to which computers. The problem is that the main server is now being turned off as the company wants to sell downloads with a new type of DRM. How odd that the old system was marketed as PlaysForSure.

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The Microsoft issue is for now confined to North America, but in Britain too consumers have been on the sharp end of such practices. In March Sony shut down its Connect music download service, meaning that if you upgrade your computer or the hard drive dies, those Justin Timberlake albums for which you paid Connect up to £10 a pop simply won’t work.

“We embarked on a seven-month communication process with customers to address this point,” said Richard Palk, former general manager of Sony’s Connect store. “We did our utmost to mitigate any problems.”

When the Virgin Digital music download store shut up shop last September, the tracks that UK customers had paid for could still be played but again were in effect handcuffed to the computers they were stored on. The music industry has always insisted that when you pay for a download you will own the song or album outright, but it’s rapidly beginning to look more like just a long-term lease.

Once, the only way to render an album defunct was by listening to it until the grooves wore out. Today, when you pay for music downloads, you could be clutching a dead duck a few weeks later. So far the problem has been restricted to small companies, but should Apple’s iTunes (which accounts for about three-quarters of the British music download market) or its rival Napster do the same thing, the fallout would be huge. The solution? Take your custom to DRM-free music vendors such as eMusic and 7digital.

Music fans who allow themselves to be fobbed off with paid-for tunes that could in effect self-destruct later are buying a ticket to Panic at the Disco.