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