Wednesday, July 14, 2004

IT'S LIKE HAVING A CONDOM WITH ONLY A COUPLE OF HOLES IN: Are there actually people working in those plush music industry offices, or do they leave it all to interns? Or maybe donkeys, albeit elderly donkeys trained in the days of punched card systems and typewriters who can't quite get to grips with the new technology. There's certainly no logic at all to some of the moves coming out of Big Music. Take, for example, the Velvet Revolver CD. In order to "protect" Slash and the drunk-driving idiot's intellectual property, the album was released with DRM built into it - indeed, it was the first record of its sort to top the US charts. Now, let's just park for a moment the obvious flaws of the locks put on the recordings, and assume that it works. There should be no VR on the peer to peer networks, then? Erm... no, because the album was released in Japan without any DRM on it, which, as Freedom to Tinker points out: "So even if the DRM technology were perfect, the music still would have leaked, via Japanese buyers, onto the P2P darknet. DRM costs the record company money to deploy, because the DRM technology must be licensed, and because of lost sales due to DRM-induced consumer inconvenience. So why in the world would a record company pay to DRM an album in some places and not in others? FTT suspects there might be some other motive at foot, but it could just be the donkeys who decided to put DRM on forgot to send a memo to the Mules in charge of the Japanese release.
[without Chromatic Musings, this post would not have been possible]


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Such stupidity is not new. The Placebo album Sleeping With Ghosts was released early last year with DRM in some regions but not others. The British version didn't have DRM, but being someone who doesn't like paying HMV/Virgin prices I bought it from cd-wow and got the, identical but with DRM crap on it, European version. Cleverly the DRM prevented my (Sony) stereo from recording the cd on to minidisc for my own personal use thus causing me to swear. Not so cleverly it didn't prevent iTunes from ripping the cd...

Extra irony is provided by the fact that I'd already had all the music on the album for nearly two months prior to it's release courtesy of p2p.


mike.

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