The Music Industry

So the new Switchfoot album came out on Tuesday and Brooke and I decided to buy it. Well, I was looking it up online to see how much it cost at various places and I noticed that the CD is copy-protected. This means that Windows users can find it difficult to copy the music on the CD to their computer, let alone to another CD. After discovering this, we decided that it’d be cheaper to just buy the CD through Wal-Mart’s music download service (Brooke had done it before…), getting the CD (plus an extra “promotional song”) for $9.44. This way, it’d not only be cheaper to buy the CD, but it’s also already be in a digital format, making it easy to burn the CD (as we would have done anyway).

…well…we downloaded the album and got all the tracks. Brooke listened to the first one to make sure it worked, and it did. Then she tried to burn them. Wouldn’t work. Kept popping up various copy-protection error messages. Not. Pleased.

I ended up having to call Wal-Mart’s music service to ask what was up. Apparently, to burn the files, you have to download them to your computer, then open up each one in Windows Media Player, thereby prompting the download of a license for EACH SONG. So I had to sit there and open up each song manually in WMP…and then could only burn it using WMP (not Nero, or some other CD burning software). Not. Pleased.

So we jumped through the hoops and got it burned. Now, I’m ripping the album into .mp3 format using a program called CDex, which is a). completely free and b). can get around copy-protected CDs. In order to get around it, you need to make sure that you put the CD in your computer and DON’T run the “autoplay” software…’cause when you do that, it installs some license crap on your system, preventing you from copying or ripping the album. Just open up CDex and rip it into your preferred format…

This crap also comes up at the same time that the music industry is trying to get Steve Jobs to raise the prices of music downloads at iTunes. There’s a full article, but to quote a key part:

“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer … Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past … We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue … We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.” — Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music Group CEO

So, Steve Jobs said last week that the music industry is greedy for trying to raise prices on iTunes downloads…and Bronfman gave the reply seen above. I think Jobs was proved right, eh?

Mr. Bronfman, the minute you stop paying talent-less “musicians” millions of dollars a year just so that they can continue living extravagantly, then I’ll consider listening to your comments… The music industry apparently has plenty of money, otherwise “artists” like Britney Spears, P. Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, and Jessica Simpson wouldn’t be raking it in every year. How about you drop their salaries to something reasonable (like…hell…$200,000 in a year…sound good enough?) and use the extra revenue to a). stop complaining so much, and b). find some good artists to promote… Otherwise, you and your company don’t need that kind of cash…it could be better spent feeding a third-world country…or hell…this country…