Every Thursday morning I point my browser to one of my favorite music review sites (aside from Blogcritics!). It's called The War Against Silence. Written by a guy named Glenn McDonald, The War Against Silence is full of the kind of writing you're not likely to find at your typical CD review site. While his style may be too wordy for some, it's worth sticking with an essay just to see where it's going (and how it gets there). An article may start out with several paragraphs on, say, World Cup Soccer...and you're thinking to yourself "ok...what's up with this?" Well, there's always a point and it's always an enlightening activity watching it crystalize.

So, last week's review was about Japanese singer Chitose Hajime...and it contains one of the best (and funniest) descriptions of the current state of the music industry I've ever read. The quote follows a short discussion on region-encoded promotional material.

The CD, of course, has no region coding; the CD-audio format defines no such mechanism. Somewhere on the planet, no doubt, a cabal of oblivious music executives is currently bemoaning this fact. They would be happier if the CD was "protected", too. Half the CDs I get from Japan do purport to be "Copy Protected", in fact, although so far iTunes and my PowerBook have been completely untroubled by whatever that "protection" entails. Apple appears, at this stage, to be the only digital media company not spending the bulk of its creative energy on ways to keep its products away from its nominal audiences, with the result that "rights management" has become a booming business with the approximate market size, moral logic and future outlook of penile enlargement. And if the occasional no-allowance ten-year-old somehow manages to elude the music industry's welcoming rotating knives, they can always be threatened with remote computer detonation, having their single-parent's home and savings confiscated, or Lars Ulrich showing up on your doorstep to perform his impression of an insomniac leprechaun who blames you for his dysentery. The music industry's ritual self-disembowelment is now so enthusiastically underway that it's hard to even hear the radio over the squelching anymore. (And the only reason the movie industry appears to be patiently waiting their turn is that all their knives are props.)

Lars Ulrich the insomniac leprechaun. I like that.

(First posted on Mark Is Cranky)