So much for those who thought they "bought" digital music from Yahoo's music-download service. Come September 30th they will find their songs may be inaccessible.

Yahoo announced earlier this year that it was ceasing its online music subscription service and was switching its customers to RealNetworks' service, Rhapsody. The subscriptions will continue at the same monthly rates as before, for now, anyway. But those who bought music under the Yahoo banner will find that the company will shut down the digital-rights management servers needed to verify that the purchased copies are legit.

Yahoo is warning that once the computers shut down, you won't be able to transfer songs to another computer or relicense them after changing operating systems.

There is one option available; Yahoo says users can burn their songs onto a regular audio CD and rip them back as an MP3 file without the copy-protection technology. But that can result in a loss of quality.