« abeaufour-no-longer-at-novell.com :( | Main | (Mozilla) XForms in IE »

November 17, 2005

I'm sick of the music industry

Argh! I would have liked to buy “KT Tunstall — Eye to the Telescope”, but once again I’m unable to buy music because of the messed up music industry.

If I go to the store, the “CD” is copy-protected which gives playback problems on my stereo. Ok, even though I’m old-school and would like to have a physical CD, I could also buy it as a downloadable album… or not! I have no Windows installation so I cannot use WMA, and not iTunes either.

Why oh why does the music industry set up these obstacles for the customers? Seeing everybody as a potential pirate is heading down the wrong path IMHO. Come on “major record label”: Make the music available easy and cheap, and live with the fact that somebody will steal it. That will happen no matter what — face it! No amount of obstacles will ever stop that. Instead you are hurting sales with this. I used to buy 2-10 CDs a month, now I’m down to 1-2 because of all this cr*p. Nice going!

Update: In my anger I totally forgot to mention the Sony rootkit affair, as a fantastic example of how twisted the minds of record companies are. Schneier (of course) has a good entry about it.

Posted by beaufour at November 17, 2005 12:13 PM

Comments

I recently found http://www.magnatunes.com which offers an interesting alternative approach to selling recorded music over the Web.

1: you can listen to their entire catalogue for free (using streaming).

2: if you do buy, you choose how much you pay (within limits).

3: you are encouraged to make and distribute copies of the recordings you buy (up to three).

4: recording are available for download at CD quality or MP3.

Posted by: MarkS [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 21, 2005 12:11 PM

Problem is that they only have small bands, etc. :(

Posted by: beaufour [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 22, 2005 1:58 AM

True, it isn’t so much the content of their catalogue that is interesting as the approach they have taken to selling music online.

Actually their “Classical” catalogue has some really good recordings by artists well-known in their own field, which admittedly means that most people have never heard of them ;-)

Posted by: MarkS [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 23, 2005 8:46 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?