Quakester2000 used our news submit to tell us about this story he spotted yesterday. It seems that CD's with copy protections are being looked at as a separate commodity and should be priced a bit lower than a normal CD since they don't work in cars or PC's.
Atlantic Records UK leader, Korda Marshall said so in an interview with BBC News anyway. It seems that the discs do serve a purpose, for them at least, in that they can release an album initially and not have it on the Internet the same day being swapped ad nauseum for free. Plus, he says that there are some "dishonest" music critics out there and they are going to be gifted with these hobbled iterations from now on.
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Many copy-protected CDs do not work on some players such as PCs and in cars. Mr Marshall suggested a new pricing structure could see fans pay more for CDs that would play on more devices. |
Well I don't know about you, but if that is the future, I don't like it. I suppose we are all supposed to sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting for 200,000 dimwits buy a crippled CD at a discount before we get one we can rip without holding down the shift key.
To add insult to injury, in the same article, Steve Jobs- drunk with euphoria over selling 3 million iPods, is now apparently a soothsayer as well. He predicts that in the next decade, we will no longer be able to even buy a CD, that all the music will be downloaded! Of course you would say that, you own iTunes. Dream on.
The fact of the matter is, a lot of music lovers don't want this muted neurotic DRM pablum. They want the physical item, then they want to use it in the car and in the PC or however they see fit, because they bought the darn thing for entertainment. Plus, not everyone has an iPod, or those type players that are so proprietary that they can't handle rival formats or radio broadcasts. Others of us have players that can't handle any DRM at all, so protected downloads just don't cut the mustard.
Let's face it, the handheld players already have a capacity so great, no one besides those whose last name is Gates, can afford to fill one with lossy tracks at 99 cents a pop. It's ridiculous to even contemplate. "Good grief Joe, did you know Fred over there has 38 gigabytes of iTunes on his player? Let's go knock it out of his hand and watch his reaction!"
Long live the unprotected CD and then bring on the next generations of optical discs, like DVD-A or SACD. What we need is something better, not something worse. Give us progress not problems.
Source: BBC News
