So You Want to be an Asshole

It's been a while, but I finally got irate enough with something to write a rant. Nothing pisses me off more than greedy musicians. People who bitch about Napster or downloading, or try to charge for mp3s are so annoying. Like these rich bastards need another $.99 from me? The latest trend is, apparently, write protected/encrypted cds.

So I bought this cd yesterday. I wanted the new Switchfoot album, so I went out and got it, and tried to listen to it on my computer. I opened the cd in Winamp, the best program for music ever, only to discover that it wouldn't play. Okay, whatever, I try Real Player, which is slightly less tolerable, but oh well. It doesn't read. My roommate looks at the cd case and it says it's only playable in the steaming pile of cow dung known as Windows Media Player. Shuddering, I open Windows Media Player. It doesn't read. She says 'oh yeah, the case says WMP nine'. Great, I just bought a cd that I can't play because some asshole felt the need to make the thing rip-proof.

Firstly, let me say that I find it hard to believe that people burning cds really deducts that much money from the band. In fact, I don't even blame the band, because they probably get about 5% of the profits from the cd, and the label gets the rest. They're getting however many billion dollars the cd rakes in, yet the producers of these cds made them impossible to rip, so some kid can't give his friend a free copy. They failed to notice that in the process of making these rip-proof, they also made it next to impossible to listen to on a computer.

Let me tell you something. If you go to Best Buy and get a $40 speaker set for your computer, it's more powerful and better quality than pretty much any of your $100-$200 stereos. Because of that, I don't have a stereo. I haven't had one for a long time because my speakers kick ass. I also don't have a portable cd player because I have an mp3 player, which is superior. So I just bought a cd and have nothing to play it on. I wonder if the brilliant producers of this album considered that?

Why would somebody make a cd so you can't listen to on any decent programs? You can't even rip mp3s with the free versions of Winamp, so why can't it play there? I'll tell you why; because suspicious, greedy bastards want to make sure nobody can have free music. God forbid somebody should share their music for the sheer joy of it.

Well, I remembered that I can rip in Linux and on Mac, so I asked my roommate, who has a Mac to rip it for me, which she did, and sent to me, so that I could play my music in Winamp. But just because I feel spiteful and had to jump through hoops and because my roommate had to waste a perfectly good cd making a copy of an album I already have, I'm going to put a few of the mp3s up for download. The beauty of this is, that for all their efforts, the greedy bastards gave me the incentive to not only try harder to get the mp3s, but to distribute them out of spite. That worked out well for them, didn't it?

Here's my message to record companies who try to make cds impossible to rip: Firstly, a cd is never rip proof. Not everybody uses Windows exclusively, so next time make sure it's protected under Mac and Linux. Oh wait, you can't, because Mac and Linux don't suck like Windows, so they can get past all their stupid failsafe guards. Secondly, where there's a will, there's a way. Even if the stupid cd was impossible to rip on a computer, somebody would find a way to do it. Hell, I can see some sly bastard recording the cd onto digital sound from a stereo and uploading it. There's always a way past guards, so instead of pissing off people and making them want to pirate your cd even more, try not being greedy. Dickheads.

Click here to download some free music!

Get me out of here!