June 30, 2004

Careful or you'll "cheney" it all up

Both my brothers have similar taste in music. A few weeks ago I wrote about a mission Scott and I went on to buy the first-day-of-release album CONTRABAND. Other brother David lusted for this CD too.

Since then this CD has become notorious. It is selling extremely well, and it turns out to be one of the most popular CDs ever which has copy protection on it. The net, including my comments areas, are aflame over this issue.

Here's the best description I've seen yet to the cause and workaround to this whole thing.

Sadly, the way RCA and SunnComm want you to listen to music is pretty complicated. You’d need to insert the CD on your PC, wait up to one minute for it to load, click an end user agreement, then only “listen” to the music. Oh, wait there’s more. It installs software which blocks making MP3s and it requires a web connection to exchange “data” and keys. On the disc there were music files in WMA format, but they don’t seem to play on any device we have which plays WMAs—the site says they play only on “approved” devices. Yikes!
Posted by jackhodgson at June 30, 2004 09:46 AM