With the announcement that CDR piracy, not illegal downloads, is responsible for the majority of its lost revenue, it looks like the music industry is gearing-up for a full roll-out of copy-protected CDs.
The halcyon days of 'owning' your music may soon be over.
The new generation of copy-protected CDs will play in a regular CD player, but when inserted in a PC CD-ROM drive under Windows, the user will only be able to rip the tracks to DRM-protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. This restricts the number and type of machines the tracks will play back on, as well as limiting any burning of the tracks onto CD.
The biggest problem facing (legal) users of these new CDs is their incompatibility with iTunes and the iPod. Since Apple is unlikely to license its own FairPlay DRM software, and even less likely to support WMA on future iPods, users are left between a rock and a hard place.
By introducing DRM-protected CDs, the industry removes the key advantage which the CD holds over the download: freedom. If buying and ripping a CD is subject to the same restrictions as the digital download, then why buy the CD? Your music will still be subject to the same restrictions, but with the download, you can have the same product instantly. The new DRM CDs will be the first move in the battle to move the casual buyer onto the download market where overheads are lower and profit margins are thicker.
The industry may be able to control new releases, but what of the back catalogue of existing releases? Sure, they can phase these out, but with billions of unrestricted CDs already out there, the industry could effectively create a huge grey market around the trading of these superior original format discs. Why would you buy Blood On The Tracks in a re-issued, restricted format when you could acquire the original CD and rip it any way you liked?
Purists, record collectors and other enthusiasts will ensure the survival of music in a physical format, after all the music industry has always thrived on the sale of image as well as sound. But when CDs were introduced in the 1980s, few could have predicted the threat an unrestricted, crystal-clear digital recording could pose in the hands of the consumer. It looks like the advent of MP3 will ultimately force the music industry to take a giant step backwards and curb consumer freedom with new releases.
The CD can survive in much the same way that vinyl has, but its days as the industry's preferred format are numbered.
Article comments
1 - Aidan R
Why buy a CD? Because a compressed file is a piece of garbage that is inferior in quality and once you learn how to hear compression, you'll always hear it and value the uncompressed original file.
2 - Yashin
Aidan,
I totally agree, but 500 million iTunes Music Store users apparently couldn't care less.
I can think of a million reasons why *I'd* prefer a CD to a compressed music file, but I suspect the industry doesn't share my concerns.
Besides, if things keep going the way they're going, we'll be regularly downloading lossless files in a few years time.
3 - Yashin
Okay, not 500 million iTunes Music Store users, but certainly several million!
4 - Mark Saleski
the day that music is no longer available on a physical medium is the day i stop buying music.
5 - vern halen
Actually, you can get pretty good quality if your mp3 sample rate is 320 kbs - for most music, it's pretty darn close to the original. Apparently, most people are even happy with a sampling rate of 192 kbs - not good enough for me personally, but that's how you cram all those songs onto your iPod or whatever it is you've got. Still, I'm against this copy protection stuff - in the end, it'll just encourage bootlegged copies with the copyprotect removed.
MAybe if the CD product was good music for an affordable price there would be fewer people trying to get a "bargain" by downloading it.
6 - Al Barger
As if some clever college boy won't defeat their nonsense copy protection crap in about five minutes, at which point even people willing to spend money on music won't be spending it on this officially released copy protected crap, but will be downloading the decoded stuff for free.
7 - Yashin
To date, copy protection has been clumsy and easy to circumvent, but the next generation of Microsoft/Intel, software/hardware DRM is likely to be a lot more hassle for both hackers and end users to get around.
At some point it's going to become more hassle than its worth to get around these things.
I'm curious what people think of the idea of a grey market in original, unprotected CD exchanging?
8 - vern halen
Actually, didn't some college guy get sued for posting that by holding the shift key down while loading a CD, the autorun function would be disabled and the copyprotect program wouldn't run? This is just a built in function of most PC's apparently.
9 - DJRadiohead
Vern, that isn't *exactly* what happened but it is kind of the gyst of it.
There are numerous ways to get around things thus far. CDEx is a program I endorse. It allows you to rip (so far) any CD to WAV format or MP3. I rip to WAV first and then encode my files in AAC for my iPod. It has worked on multiple 'copy-protected' CDs.
10 - vern halen
Thanks kindly. I'll keep that for future reference.
11 - Yashin
The old copy-protected CD with their Java music players were a joke, a 3-year-old could bypass them.
The latest DRM CD releases will enforce protection on Windows machines, but users are free to rip the CDs on machines running Linux or Mac.
However, the industry is getting serious about it and this freedom can't last for long.
12 - Tan The Man
DualDiscs might entice users to actually buy the physical disc with bonus materials a la DVD that users can't get anywhere else. I'm not sure about the copy protection on these bad boys, but it seems like the next big thing. Too bad DVD-Audio or SACD never caught on.
13 - Marco
You could rip ANY CD - not an 1:1 copy but good enough: play the CD in your CD player and record the sond through your sound card with e.g. CoolEdit or Nero WaveEdit. Then you could burn the (Wave) tracks to an unprotected CD or distribute it through the internet for others to download ;)
14 - Mark Saleski
However, the industry is getting serious about it and this freedom can't last for long.
the only thing the industry is getting serous about is spending a boatload of money on these silly schemes that will do nothing but piss people off...pushing them toward even more p2p downloads.
the freedom that won't last long is the freedom the labels have to push around their customers.