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Sunday, January 01, 2006

Pirates Of The Corporation

We are so very concerned about the pirating, and the trading of these MP3s that all the kids are doing on their MySpace sites these days. Truly the downfall of the rapacious tool-laden music industry is nigh.

Thankfully Coldplay is leading the way, with super-duper DRM technology loaded into every copy of their new drink coaster/music product you decide to purchase. Just take a look at some of these bonuses:

  • You can't make a copy, even for your own personal use.

  • It won't play in any player, car or home, that can also play a CD-R/RW.

  • It won't even play in some PCs, and even then, only "certain" tracks will play in "some" PCs.

  • It won't play in a car stereo with a satellite "guidance" system.

  • If you try to hum along with any of the patented melodies, a small arm wielding a miniature baseball bat comes out from your player and hits you in the nuts. Nothing like a disembodied cockpunch.

  • If you try to sing any of the manifestly copyrighted lyrics, the CD will self-destruct so that your house will catch on fire.

  • If you happen to be a musician, and you for some reason try to learn how to play any of these songs, an automated program will call all your friends and tell them you're gay. Of course, since you listen to Coldplay, they already know that.

Considering that Sony just got caught red-handed fucking people's PCs up with this goddamned DRM shit (which was loading on to people's PCs without their knowledge or approval, which seems like grounds for a class-action lawsuit), why the hell should anyone trust that the DRM in the Coldplay CD is just some sort of benign anti-piracy protection? Bullshit. They want to know who's been stealing what, and by God, they've finally found another way to do it.

Great marketing strategy, guys. Treat your customers like they're criminals, talk to them like they're five-years-old, and act like they should somehow be grateful for the opportunity to pay $20 for a disc with maybe three good songs on it, that they can't do anything with. Yeah, I can't imagine why anyone poaches music.

This is the same shit we heard way back in the day. Those of us past a certain age may recall that when blank audio cassettes were introduced to the vaunted free market, the record companies went batshit. They were pissed that this business -- in which they themselves were making up all the rules as they went along -- might get out of their control. It's not that record companies have a problem with musicians being ripped off, it's that it's supposed to be the companies that get to do the ripping off, of both the fans and the musicians.

I mean, God forbid a kid might copy the precious off a scratchy radio station, or trade songs with his friends. The record companies shoot themselves in the foot with this attitude, because the kids that do that sort of thing are the most loyal type of music fans. They're the people the record companies have wet dreams about. When they feel like a band is "on their side", they'll buy anything and everything that band puts out, including all the swag (which is really the most lucrative part for the band, if not the record company).

Metallica may the most illustrative example of this. They got their initial wave of underground popularity in exactly the way I describe -- fans trading tapes of shows and bootlegged copies of demos. Next thing you know, Master of Puppets goes platinum with no radio whatsoever, which is unheard of, and Metallica get a slot on Van Halen's Monsters of Rock tour in '88. That's what got them into a position to assert creative control over what they were doing, on a major-label contract.

After their extended late '96-early '98 barnstorming world tour, in which they literally set up special front sections for audience members to record and even film concerts, Metallica got a serious case of the stupids and went after Napster. Why? Because of a very stupid song called I Disappear, which Metallica had done for the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack, probably for points. When the song hit Napster a week or two before its official release, Lars Ulrich snapped, and dragged the band into something from which its reputation will probably never fully recover. When you stake your rep on being about the kids, from the streets, etc., you don't go to the wall for a lame song from a lame movie, especially after you're already a kajillionaire.

Coldplay is about to learn this lesson the hard way.


[via Atrios.]

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