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BMG Stops Producing CDs
An Anonymous Cow writes "The register has a new story about claims by Bertelsmann that they'll stop manufacturing uncrippled audio CDs. More can be found on Bertelsmann's own site (info by region, Europe only). Trouble playing it in your car stereo? According to BMG the error is your player's, and not their CD's. Quote: 'As far as we were advised, our copy protection is according to the Red Book Standard as well as all labelling on the cd.' In English: they don't even find it necessary to indicate on the CD cover that it's copy protected, nor do they think it advisable to listen to Philips' objections against using the CD logo on crippled discs, instead there's a label claiming that the CD is fully Red Book-compliant. It looks like this is a test case, because only all European CDs will be crippled."
False Advertising...
How about BMG create their own standards and call it something else?
I am sure this will lead to more sales, because everyone knows when you spit in the customers eye and take away their ability to do that which they did before, they always reward you for it.
--Joey
Well, if I can no longer spend my hard-earned money on CDs that will play on the various CD players around my house (including, I might add, the one in my computer), guess I'll have to resort to just downloading the songs instead from whatever Napster-clone I decide to use at the time... And all this time I thought they WANTED us to be buying their CDs... Sheesh!
If you BUY their products, you will only encourage them.
If you stop paying for their products, the RIAA and MPAA won't have money to pay congressmen/women for laws like the DMCA.
Seriously. It seems to me that if they are going to be using the CD logo (even stating outright that the disk is compliant to Red Book standards) that Philips should be able to haul them to court over improper and misleading usage of Philip's trademark.
Don't know if Philips has enough interest in doing so, though. After all, removing the mark from these "discs that kind of look like CDs" would probably make zero difference to the buying public, but would in fact remove a (probably small) revenue stream for Philips (BMG would no longer need to licence the trademark for their packaging).
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
The disc may be barely compliant with the red book specs for cd audio, but the changes to the 'redundant' data to throw data decoders will ensure the error handling capability is serverely reduced. One scratch could literally kill your CD. Thing is, the majority of consumer electronics firms are rapidly going in the MP3 direction (hence data drives) which would spit out 'protected discs'. This is the manufacturing industry going one way and the media industry going the other. That leaves the consumers caught between a rock and a hard place. :-(
If it does not work, take them back to the store. Demand your money back.
I was under the assumption that Sony and Phillips owned all the rights to the use of the CD Logo and the right to claim that a CD is Red Book compliant. I'm sure Phillips will file suit against this.
This is all just an attempt by a dying industry to save itself. With the advent of P2P file sharing services and the now defunct Napster, people don't NEED record companies any more to distrinute their music or to give them their music.
In my ideal world, the music would be available for download from some web site by an artist and then a CD/DVD is made with lots of value add stuff, such as 5.1 surround mixes, possible music videos, etc.
It was good while it lasted. Guess it's time to stop buying my music and start stealing it like everyone else. :(
They are going to produce a product which is the same size as a CD, and even looks the same. But if it won't play on a CD player then it's not a CD.
...because of this whole war they are waging on their customers.
Do you?
And make it very clear in writing ( polite, paper mail ) why its being done.
If they continue with the plan, I guess we all just have to find a way to rip them onto a cdR that isnt crippled so we can use what we own in the car, at work, etc..
If we dont stop it, then the others will follow suit shortly afterwards.
I wonder what Phillips has to say about this whole thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
An analogy. You try to get a restraining order against some guy. The judge throws it out of court for lack of grounds. So you keep crank calling him, and egging his car, until he is so ticked off that you actually do need the protection.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Just because a program compiles, it doesn't mean it will work. It simply means it complies with the language specification and it's syntactially correct. The program itself might not work at all.
The same goes for CDs. The specification doesn't neccessarily mean that the CD will be playable - only that it has certain features and is encoded in a certain way.
Nick...
I guess I'll just have to stop buying CDs and start downloading more MP3s then. From people who've made slightly noisy, but free copies from their stereos.
This is just getting more and more stupid. I'm not going to go download stuff from Kazaa just get, for one the effort it'd take to get it going in Wine combined with the general nastyness of the software and illegallity of it has put me off until now. I'm waiting for (and soon hopefully doing something about) the gift economy as a new model for music distribution, but there are quite a few technical and social hurdles to overcome first.
How long can the music industry keep this up though before what happened to Microsoft with Linux happens to the RIAA - the little people come out of the woodwork and come up with something new? Not long at this rate. Not long at all.
I agree, but to me it appears complex on the part of the buying public than that. Will John Q. Buyincds decide that he doesn't want to buy the new Avril Lavigne CD because it won't work in his existing CD player? Or will they buy another brand just to have the ability to get that new CD later on if they want it, just because some rogue music publisher asserts that their existing player is faulty (I say rogue meaning against the grain, they are certainly not an upstart)? In a perfect world, people would see the social responsibility involved, and would keep their existing, non-BMG-compliant readers or buy new ones, and just not buy BMG crippled CDs. Unfortunately, people nowadays tend to shrug off social responsibility in favor of convenience, so they might keep their Phillips player for now, but all external forces aside, probably buy a Sony or Kenwood CD player next time (assuming that those companies adhere to BMG standards).
--- What
I suspect they're engaged on some wacko conspiracy: "Do as much as we can to lose money and then blame it on customers. And then, once we've reached bottom, we'll ... um ... well, we haven't figured that part out yet. Our goal is to simply piss off consumers, hit bottom, and then blame folks."
1) Buy out all the radio stations
2) Raise the barriers to artists who don't "sell out"
3) Screw over the consumers
4)
5) Profit!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
If they can pull it off in Europe (the hardest place to do it, thanks to EU governments being less friendly), they can pull it off anywhere.
Better than deciding your scheme works in the US and hitting a brick wall in Europe.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
No? Look at the aggressive line that they're taking. "These are RedBook CD's and the problem is in your player". You can bet your life that they'll pass this position on to retaillers and make it 100% clear that they won't be accepting "bad media" returns on these disks.
So try taking one of these crippled music disks back to MonstroMart and claiming that it doesn't play in your CD player. Last month they'd have taken it back (maybe), and that cost Bertelsmann money. This month, they'll trot out the "the fault is in your player" line like the loyal little appendages that they are and stonewall you, because of two things. One, they know that it's not like you've got a choice in how you obtain music in the future, because every store will be carrying crippled disks, and two, if it turns out that your daddy is a lawyer, they can always point the finger at Bertelsmann and claim that ze vere only obeying orders.
Those people predicting a drop in sales that will scare off other music behemoths need to take a clue pill. Mandy Music Buyer doesn't read The Register or Slashdot, and she won't know about these crippled disks until she buys one. She'll buy the disk, then find out that it's crippled. Sure, she'll be pissed off if she can't play it in her mom's SUV's CD player (Mandy Music Buyer is 12-18, remember), but what's she going to do? Stop buying music disks? Friends, if she's still buying them today, she's not going to switch to kazaa or gnutella tomorrow. She's going to keep buying them and whine at her mommy that the man at the music store said the SUV's CD player was broken.
And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Remember when they used to print black text on a dark black background for game "code books" to keep people from photocopying them (And then being able to copy and run the game without owning it)?
I find this sentence especially amusing from the Bertelsmann's site :
"World music sales for the year 2001 fell by 5% in value and by 6,5% in units."
Blaming that music downloaders where the reason for the fell. I wonder if they remember that there was a recession in 2001, IT bubble broke and almost all industries fell into downswing. It would've been a miracle if CD sales hadn't dropped at all and 5% is LITTLE compared to the bankruptcies that other industries had to deal with.
(It's amazing that restaurants don't blame home cooks for the recession, stealing the recipes that they use, and using them free at home! can you see the analogy?)
If you BUY their products, you will only encourage them.
But if you don't TELL them you've stopped buying their products, they assume it's just a sales slump, and devote more time, energy, and most of all MONEY to passing bad laws and trying to enforce copy-protection. After all, they already KNOW what causes sales slumps -- piracy and P2P applications. (Never mind the facts, they know the truth.)
So as I've said before (and nobody, apparently, was listening), it's not enough to just stop buying. You have to tell them about it, too.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I haven't bought many CDs in recent years, but I was just about to start again. I probably will buy one or two in the next weeks.
When I'm buying my CD, I will explain to them about this, and I want to know for sure that my computer can read it (it's the only CD player I have). I want a money back guarantee from them, or at least the right to swap my CD for another if it doesn't work. And if they refuse, I'll take my business elsewhere. It's not much, but there aren't many stores that don't care about selling stuff.
I want the stores to know that they're missing revenue and exactly why that's happening. They might ask their distributor for non-crippled CDs. That way at least my 'boycott' just might make some people aware of the quality of this idea.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
A better solution would be to change the business model instead of trying to prevent people to copy CD's.
What are the reasons people currently make illegal copies of music:
1) CD's are too expensive.
2) The artist only sees a fraction of the price of a CD.
3) It is illegal, which makes it more attractive.
4) It is possible.
CD manufactures currently try to attack only the fourth reason instead of focusing on the other three (well, perhaps the third reason is hard to remove). Besides, when my ordinary CD player can read the disk, the CD player in my computer can do it as well, but maybe it requires a firmware upgrade.
A better solution would be to focus on the other reasons and change the business model used to sell CD's. For instance, I think it would be really great to surf the net, download music from the artist's website, pay a honest fee for it and burn it to CD myself. I believe there are many other people who download music in this fassion if a fair price was asked.
Of course, you still have the problem that music can be copied, but it is impossible to change that. The only thing that can be done is make it more difficult, but once someone circumvents the copy protection, it is totally worthless. Instead, music makers should focus on bringing the prices of music down and improve the experience people get while buying music.
Big problem, for the same reason they won't play in cdrom's these new cd's won't play in a spdif enabled cd audio player. The goal for the media companies is to keep us from having "perfect digital copies" What they fail to realize is 90+% of people don't care about perfect. If they did they wouldn't be trading 128 or 192 mp3's. The loss from a good analog audio cable is much less then the loss from a 128k mp3. Besides people used to copy tape to tape back in the day, if people find that level of quality exceptable then anything else should be fine. What the do end up doing is pissing off people like me who want to stick the cd they bought into the cdrom, have it ripped and tagged and then send it to our portable. I personally have an iPod and I rip everything at ~220k VBR using LAME, not something I can get off of kazaa or whatever.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Let's make this more than I joke. I just wrote to BMG and said, because of your stance I will not buy your product. I want a fully versatile CD and you are committed not to deliver.
And I will back this up with actions. Eventually I suspect I will have to transition to all independent producers. When I do so I will let them know why I decided to start investigating their product base. If something I want to purchase comes out on BMG I will contact the artist and tell them why they lost a sale.
The major recording labels see lost sales in unencumbered CDs. Whether this is ultimately true or not is not relevant. Unless they start seeing and hearing about lost sales because of Digital Rights Management they will continue on this course.
Universal got the same letter from me a year ago. I haven't purchased a product from them since.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
And heck, let's say I'm wrong, and sales do take a noticable dip. What are BMG going to blame it on? Their own greed and stupidity? Hahahaha! I'll give you short odds on "global economy" or (more likely) that this proves that people are thieves and criminals, and that we need Fritz chips right now to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way. It's win-win for them, and all our outraged ranting won't make it otherwise.
... leading to ... show me this ogg-vorbis stuff you've been talking about!), "This is strange, I can't play the CD in the car but it works fine at home" (ah, you bought a crippled CD. Welcome to the future the Recording Cartels have planned for us ... you're only allowed to play that CD in specially authorized players), and so on.
You are right, our outraged ranting on slashdot won't make it otherwise.
However, our outraged ranting to our families, our friends, our coworkers, and our business associates (over beer, after work, etc.) will make all the difference in the world.
I have already shocked, appalled, and outraged numerous people simply by telling them what has been going on. It is particularly effective when it is done in response to "I think my PC is broken, it no longer plays my music" (oops, you saved your music in windoze media format and didn't unclick the DRM option. You won't be able to forget to do that in the next version of windows, because there won't be an option to unclick, everything will be 'protected.'
I have educated a pretty large number of non-savvy people about what is going on with the DMCA (Sklyrov, etc.), the RIAA (Janis Ian, Prince, etc. al documenting the recording industry's rape of artists AND consumers, etc.), and the MPAA (Fritz Disney Hollings et al), and they are pissed. Not at me, for ranting about technical issues they don't care about, but at these organizations and our hopelessly corrupt, wicked government. They are pissed because it has become painfully obvious that we do live under the tyranny of evil men, with apparently no way out, and they are sick of giving money to such.
So now they buy less CDs, attend less concerts, and go to less movies than before. Not a complete boycott like myself, but they are spending less and they are much, much more aware.
Which brings me to the the point of all this: there is one way in which WE, not THEY, can and should win:
Simply stop buying their crap.
Like music? Listen to independent artists ONLY. Do not buy any CDs from any record company, buy them direct from the artist or not at all. And if they are crippled, return them and publicly blacklist the artist for what they've done.
Like movies? Go see independent films only. If you cannot get over your pathetic addiction to the mindless bread and circuses of Hollywood, at least avoid seeing movies during the first two weeks of release (when most of the revninue goes to the studios), instead wait and see the movies in third or fourt weeks (when most of the revinue goes to the local thatre). Not as good as a proper boycott, but better than following the stampede.
In the end, though, is to simply be unforgiving of such people. Don't buy their stuff now, and don't ever buy it again. Get enough of your friends to feel likewise, and they will falter, even ultimately perish.
No one likes losing their freedom, and everyone sees it happening. Until now, they've only had the vague notion that 'the government' is taking away their freedoms and 'it doesn't seem to matter who we elect.'
Now there is a specific target for that ire, for that anger, a specific, relatively small group of companies that are actively, methodically, and deliberately stripping us of our freedoms, and use government collussion or, at best, apathy go do it.
And, unlike (most) governments, companies are something we as individuals can topple.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
It is a widely recommended practice for parents with a small child to burn and use copies of their CDs, and keep the 'master' (the original CD) in a safe place.
To make matters worse, if what you say is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), I won't even be able to play the songs on my music system as the CD player clearly isn't 'standard' (though I fail to see what's more 'standard' than a mid-range Sony deck).
This leaves me with two options:
- Buy a new (crappier) CD player that only has analogue out. Copy my lovely digital CDs via analogue to my portable MD/computer thus loosing all the crispness of the original music.
- Skip buying the CD and just download the tracks via KazaaLite/Gnucleus. I get the same quality as 1) but save 12 quid each time!
What a brilliant business move! They'll be depriving me of high quality music, and themselves of any revenue! I wish I had an MBA and could think of such award winning ways of increasing shareholder value!You know, this "not a CD player" and "not a CD" spiel came off as propoganda at first, but it's pretty legitimate.
I've never purchased an audio CD in my life -- I don't own a single one (well, except for a hybrid CD, Marathon I, that also has the game music in Red Book).
I was thinking, recently, about possibly purchasing one, though I'd lose my reputation, but the rapid elimination of CDs has solved this at two levels -- I have far less interest in a CD-like device with no error correction, and even in the unlikely case I did purchase one, it wouldn't be a CD.
May we never see th
Let me get out my calculator for this one... Aw, F. it, lets just do the global picture: If sales of units fall more than the value of those sales, units must have gotten more expensive.
So... Might it just be that the already inflated prices (22 euros/mainstream CD) being pushed higher combined with economic down-turn have anything to do with this?
These greedy bastards should be thoroughly thankfull people apparantly like music so much that they haven't stopped buying CD's at all in favour of buying food, paying their phonebills or anything else that for most people rates higher on their list than CD's.
Sheesh.
Karma? What's that again?
I suspect they're engaged on some wacko conspiracy: "Do as much as we can to lose money and then blame it on customers. And then, once we've reached bottom, we'll ... um ... well, we haven't figured that part out yet. Our goal is to simply piss off consumers, hit bottom, and then blame folks."
Don't kid yourself, they're not that dumb. In fact, they're pretty damned smart people, regardless of what we'd like to believe.
First, their goal isn't to drive customers away, their goal is to stop piracy -- not the piracy that exists now as much as the massive piracy that they can see coming as inevitably as sunrise. They realize that the actions they're taking may drive customers away, but it's impossible to be completely sure, and it's really okay either way. Why?
Well, if the stuff they're doing stops piracy (or even keeps it from increasing) without alienating all of their customers, then they're in good shape. Particularly since these non-CDs are more fragile, which should increase purchases. They'll get back one of the things they liked most about vinyl and shellac.
On the other hand, if it doesn't work out like that then they'll run to the various governments, starting with the US, show their blood-stained balance sheets and claim that they're being put out of business by piracy and that they need legislation to protect them. If the governments oblige them by passing something like CBDTPA, they are suddenly in an incredibly powerful position, where they have more control than they have *ever* had, maybe more than they've ever dreamed. Suddenly, they become able to effectively write copyright law the way they want it. If they were also to get government authorization to act as the copyright police (c.f. the recent bill that would authorize the RIAA to proactively shut down file-trading networks), then they would be lawmaker, policeman, judge, jury and executioner with regard to anything that touches on music. Think there's an opportunity to make a buck there?
And, even if they only get part of the governmental support that they want, they may still end up with more power, control and cash flow than they have ever had.
On the other hand, they're smart enough to realize that trying to adapt to the "new reality" will spell a vast reduction in their power and influence. In a digital, networked age, distribution is a non-issue. If artists don't need the record companies to handle that huge and difficult job, what do they need them for? Venture capital? Not really, at least not for production, since a high-end PC with a professional-quality sound card pretty much eliminate the need for a multi million-dollar sound studio. What's left? Promotion. They fully recognize that becoming a specialized appendage of the advertising industry won't make them a tiny fraction of the money they make now.
And, finally, they realize that even if their anti-piracy measures fail, and their legal maneuvering fails, they can still fall back and become promoters, which is where they'll end up anyway. Sure, their actions will get them to that ignominious (from their point of view) end faster than doing nothing, but their actions create other possibilities, all of which are better (for them) than the pre-Internet era and some of which are hugely, unbelievably better.
Astute readers will note that in my summary of the above calculations nowhere was the interest of the artist mentioned. That's because it's not relevant, except as a second-order effect. Artists are the product, and every businessman knows that having a product does you no good if you can't sell it.
What's the right solution to make sure that artists are protected and paid so that we continue to have a flow of music and other entertainment? No one knows. It's clear, though, that the status quo is doomed. In 20 years, high-speed Internet connections will be as common as telephones are today. It will be possible to download a full album of music, or even a full movie, complete with cover art and extras cheaply and easily. That's a fact. Society will have to discover as time goes on just what that fact is going to do, and what kinds of business models can succeed.
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