An excellent article on CNet, updating on the issue in depth.

Also: an interview with SunnComm, who did the copy protection on the Charley Pride CD.

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The power ballad is one of the finer sprouts of the hard rock’n'roll tree. When the adolescent males have slammed, stagedived and pogoed their little hearts out to your fast ones, going up to four (or even five) chords (on acoustic, of course) with that big, slow “thump … tha-THUMP … thump … tha-THUMP” drum line will cement your cred as a truly great writer of truly moving songs and not just another spandex-clad, fretwanking attention-seeker searching the front row for male adulation and female lust dumb enough to lead to a night with you.

As a musical form, this heavy metal/cabaret pop crossover’s spread into the ‘alternative’ field has enabled a host of single-riff bands to say that, yes, they are real and deep songwriters of the kind that will live off their publishing for the terms of their natural lives, since it’s now a well-known fact that selling a million records through a major will probably leave you deeper in debt than selling a hundred thousand, let alone what you got selling four tapes a night at the Empress.

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The first major release of a copy-protected CD appears to be “Rock Your World” by Michael Jackson, according to Need To Know - the promo copies work on most CD players, but are unrecognised by current CD-ROM firmware.

This is a problem for all consumers - as the UK Campaign for Digital Rights points out, “These new CDs will play fine to start with, but underneath, the sounds have been subtly corrupted. Your CD player has to work much harder to play the music correctly, so after a few scratches, you’ll have tracks going wrong MUCH SOONER than with normal CDs. In truth, these CDs are not as good quality as normal CDs.”

The Campaign recommends a policy of taking back non-playing CDs as defective immediately (pointing to the ‘CD Digital Audio’ logo, which does constitute a claim that the disc meets the logo’s standards), or taking it back if it fails after a short time.

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In light of recent attempts of mine to pick up, it’s probably good to remind myself of why screwing musicians sucks. This article was written a few years ago and is a little bit dated - I’m not sure if Michael Gudinski has any actual influence in The Biz these days - so if anyone has any ideas to update it I’m not too proud to steal them.

Dedicated to the forgotten buttress of the rock industry, the non-musician wife or girlfriend.

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Clear Channel, the company working to ensure as absolute a playlist monoculture in the US as possible - and which is sniffing around radio in Australia - has blacklisted several hundred songs in the wake of the events of last Tuesday.

Included are songs about war, the word “Tuesday”, “Walk Like an Egyptian”, and even “Peace Train” and “Imagine”. According to Fucked Company, the list has indeed been confirmed as being for real.

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