Neil Shah - Pianist/Vocalist/Composer

Sony’s copy protection logo.

I’ve made it a point to look towards the positive aspects of being a musician and the industry that revolves around music. After years of being deep into jazz and snubbing my nose at a lot of stuff, I’ve realized that I was actually the one missing out on some amazing things. After all, most of the people who really inspired me early on had little to do with jazz. When I was twelve, I practically learned how to play the guitar single-handedly through Nirvana’s Nevermind.

But the “big industry” really does continue to show me that it misses the basic point. That is—good music is what will keep them alive. They keep unabashedly focusing tremendous amounts of time and money on trying to protect their market dominance while blaming the digital paradigm for their woes—woes that are actually the result of saturating their own market with poor product.

Ironically, it’s the digital realm that has enabled them to crank out an absurd number of products. With digital recording and editing, sequencing and mixing—they cut albums fast, market the hell out of them and complain that college kids aren’t paying for the stuff.

The latest proof that the big boys are wasting their time comes from this recent article in Wired. According to the article, Sony has put copy-protection software, called XCP, on a recent batch of releases. XCP not only installs spyware on your computer (sending Sony information like how often you play the album), but leaves your computer completely vulnerable to a slew of viruses or mailicious attacks.

Look closely: cp.sonybmg.com/xcp

Sony has appropriately halted production on these releases, but is yet to recall them from the shelves (which would be the right thing to do). Here’s a list of albums that contain the software—I actually don’t think anyone I know would own any of these, except maybe the Gerry Mulligan album.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 14th, 2005 at 12:35 pm and is tagged music, business, photos. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed and Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.