Music Industry Continues Its Assault On People Willing To Pay For Its Product

noah | July 19, 2007 8:47 am
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UPDATE: As I was just informed in an e-mail from someone at Warner, the CD Tom Breihan bought is apparently defective. Hooray, Warner isn’t Sony BMG–at least not yet! Now about those unplayable promo CDs…

A few weeks ago, Idolator brought you the story of a frustrated music writer who had been locked out of listening to his promo copy of the new Eisley CD because of its copy protection. The record label behind that album was Reprise, which is part of the Warner Music Group–a company that, as it turns out, isn’t only making the freebies they give out to journalists hard to play. Tom Breihan at Status Ain’t Hood bought the new album by Against Me!, New Wave, last week; it’s on WMG subsidiary Sire, and it, too, is unplayable on his primary CD player, a.k.a. the one inside his computer:

I can now say from personal experience that it’s really frustrating to have this happen with something you paid for. You keep checking the CD, ejecting it and reinserting it, trying to figure out if something is wrong with your computer even after you figure out what’s actually going on. I felt like an absolute chump for being dumb enough to fork over money for something I couldn’t use. I’ve still only heard New Wave because I downloaded it illegally later that day. That’s a shame; New Wave is a truly great album, and Sire Records is doing Against Me a grave disservice by preventing people from actually hearing the damn thing.

Especially since, as Breihan later notes, a lot of the band’s fans seem to be pretty young, and more digital-savvy than their older counterparts; surely the people at Sire knew this, and would want to discourage them from eventually downloading the album, even if they’d bought a copy that was uploadable? Perhaps the company is counting on padding their profit margins with the extra CDs bought by dumb kids who thought they’d purchased “defective” copies.

Why You Can’t Hear Against Me’s Masterpiece [Village Voice] Earlier: Music Writer To Record Label: “Would You Like Me To Listen To This Disc Before I Review It?”