Media

Music

Music is where it is all about, so here are some links to obtain music.

  • Interesting online music stores:
    • iTunes Music Store. A large variety, though not available in many many countries (see XYZ), limited to 128kbit/sec AAC files (audible artifacts), and quite expensive (see allofmp3 instead).
    • Allofmp3. A Russian website, where you can get loads of music for about $0.50 for a whole album. For each MB of data, $0.01 is charged. You can select your favourite encoding (lossless, MP3, AAC, Ogg). So the longer the song, and the higher the encoding quality, the more you pay.
  • Interesting music stores:
  • Allmusic is an incredible encyclopedia. Warmly recommended!!!
  • Gnoosic is a nice site to, given some of your favourite artists, discover new music that you may like.
  • CD covers can be found at mega-search (full size) or allmusic (small size). These can be used to be added the ID-tag of the MP3/AAC files, but be warned that they increase the size of each file!!!

Some notes about the music industry

The music industry claims it suffers from loss of revenues. An article on BBC news, as well as the following figure show that this is simply not true:

As can be seen from the figure, there is an increase in the sale of (music) DVDs, which compensates for the minor drop in sales of music CDs. People spend a ratio of their income to entertainment, and there are shifts in different technologies. DVDs are also considered to be more value for the money. The idea of selling 60 minutes of music on a disc, probably only a few songs of real interest to people, is getting more and more old fashioned with the raise of online music stores and jukeboxes where thousands of selected songs can be shuffled.

The music industry claims they loose money due to illegal copying of music through internet. Though I'm not advocating copying illegal music at all, I strongly object against the reasoning that each illegal copied song is loss of income. In economic science there is a thing called "price index", which means that at a lower (higher) price more (less) products are being sold. In practice, this means that if people have to pay for all the music they have, they would simply have less music. So, loss of income cannot be connected to each illegal song out there. But again, this does not validate illegal copying at all. But the billions loss of income claimed by the music industry is a hoax as well!

Copy Protection

The music industry is currently applying copy protection to audio CDs. Basically, they try to fool a computer based player about the contents of the disc so that it cannot be played or copied on a computer. An ordinary CD player approaches the contents of a disc differently, and should therefore play the CD without any problems. That's the theory...

What is wrong with all of this?

Protecting the property and income of the artist is a good thing, no argument about that. However, copy protection has some very nasty side effects:

  • MP3 players. My main problem: it's not possible to copy music legally to your MP3 player. The music industry says that though it is not illegal to make a copy of your own CDs for private puposes, it is not a consumers' right, hence the industry is not obliged to give you this opportunity. The music industry says it offers alternatives, but this is limited to offering bad quality audio files of limited formats (e.g. WMA), unplayable on my iPod. Some weak alternatives are offered Though this may be legally right, this is extremely consumer unfriendly and arrogant. The music industry claims they will provide alternative channels for MP3 players in the future (e.g. downloadable MP3-files which you can obtain via a password delivered with a CD). I'm wondering whether this will be a free service after you've already bought the music, or whether it will be a paid service like iTunes Music Store (which is only accessible in the US, not in EU...). Hence, the music industry introduces copy protection without a decent solution today. Additionaly, the question is whether you can download files in your favourite encoding format (AAC 224kbit/s?), or in an less good format (MP3 128kbit/s), or only in formats that are not supported all around (WMA, AAC). Concluding: today we're stuck with a problem introduced by he music industry.
  • Incompatibility. Copy protected CDs don't play on CD-ROMs, and also don't work correctly in many CD players, DVD players, car-radio-CD-players. Some PCs are even reported to crash, or are not compatible with the hooks applied. Though the industry is aware about those problems, and say they "improve" the schemes, people are confronted with non-working CDs, which will not be fixed in the coming years.
  • Recognition. You can hardly recognize copy protected CDs. The box may contain several logo's, but the box around it is the same. Legally, a copy protected CD is not a Compact Disc. But in contrast to for instance DVDs, no special box is around it.

It is clear that the music industry prioritizes protection of music contents above customer friendliness. I'm not favouring a music-is-free-for-everybody situation at all, music should be bought through legal channels, but I'm against a system not making a difference between legal and illegal usage of music. Each customer is considered to be a potential guilty copier, as shown by the fair amount of royalties put on the price of CD-Rs. As far as I understood legal systems, a person is not guilty unless proven otherwise. For the music industry different rules seem to apply. Incredible...

Basically, I never saw a difference between a normal CD and a copy protected CD, because my Macintosh never had any problem accepting and reading a copy protected CD. For persons having problems with copy protected CDs, hacks seem to exist.

This shows that illegal practices won't be stopped by this protection, any protection can be easily bypassed. I guess the music industry will keep working on making copying impossible, but spokesman of CD-R devices say they will patch their equipment such that copy protections will be by-passed.

The result the music industry achieved so far is that I refuse to buy any copy protected CD. The first copy-protected CD I bought by accident (Massive Attack 100th Window) refused to play in one of my CD players, so I brought it back to the shop immediately. I hope that lots of other people will do the same, so that a clear signal is given to the music industry that we expect normal playable CDs, not the crap they are selling now.

Links

  • A nice cartoon about copy protection and artists.

© Copyright (but not copy protected) 2003, Marc Heijligers