In order to satisfy owners and producers of digital content, such as music, movies, and the like, digital content distribution requires many commercial and technical safeguards. Providers of digital content often must take measures to prevent access to their content by unauthorized computer programs, for fear that these applications will illegally copy, display, or distribute the protected content. Moreover, legitimate content providers often license content from content owners and/or producers (e.g., artists, record labels, movie studios, etc.), and the terms of the licenses typically require that adequate safeguards be used so that the licensed content is protected from pirating. Thus, distributors of such content often use digital rights management (“DRM”) tools to prevent copying and recording of their content. But DRM techniques and the strict terms of the licenses between content providers and content owners/producers often impede legitimate content providers from offering fast, convenient, and ubiquitous access to their content catalogs. The ideas disclosed herein help alleviate these problems, and allow legitimate content providers to expand the ways in which they provide licensed digital content to users and third parties.