Afishionados,

A Borders bookstore in my neck of the woods featured a CD that caught my attention this afternoon. The nice thing about Borders is that 1.) It’s never crowded because nobody shops at the mall that it’s in since a newer and larger mall is 10 minutes away and 2.) You can preview tracks of all the the CDs they sell on computer kiosks within the bookstore.

The album was “Twenty-three”¹ by Tristan Prettyman and, after listening to a couple songs, I ended up buying it. I imagine the CD was featured because she’s opening for Guster in Seattle tonight. In any event, I like her “folksy acoustic-ness”.

I didn’t pay much attention to the CD case at the store (who does, really?) and just bought it like I’ve done a million times before with a million other CDs.

While I’m the happy owner of an Apple MacBook, I use my iPod with my Windows PC because it has a bigger hard drive, all my songs are already on my PC, and I don’t want to spend the time moving all my music over to my Mac.

Anyhoo, I inserted Tristan’s CD into my PC in hopes of importing it as an AAC file into iTunes. Once the CD drawer closed, I waited. And waited. And waited some more, watching iTunes and looking for the CD icon to appear so I could start the importing process.

The CD never showed up in iTunes. Instead, I was greeted with a warm and fuzzy copyright notice agreement in glorious pop-up flash animation form.

The notice said something like “In order to play this music on your PC, you must agree to the following:

1.) You must give to us, Virgin Records, your first born child on Halloween night at precisely 12:01 A.M.
2.) You must provide two forms of I.D.
3.) You must submit a urine, stool, and semen sample. All at once.
4.) You must disclose the location of Iraq’s WMDs.

“WTF is this?” I thought to myself. “Is this software CD or a music CD? I just want to listen to it in iTunes, dammit!!!”

Of course I had to agree to the licensing agreement, else the CD wouldn’t even show up under “My Computer”. Even after agreeing, the CD would not show up in iTunes. Instead, the album plays in its own Flash-based CD player. Once again, “WTF” ran through my mind.

I tried to manually locate the song files on the CD but Tristan Prettyman is a sneaky little devil, as she hid them from me. Curses!

I had never seen such crazy shit with a music CD before. Upon closer examination of Tristan’s CD case, I saw that it emphasized the fact that the album was, indeed, copyprotected. On the back of the CD, in the finest print perceptable to the human eye, was this:

Tristan must like rules and regulations because her CD case goes on to list even more stipulations: (Ironic, since she’s an independent and emerging artist and I would have figured she’d want people to be able to hear her sing.)

What the hell, Tristan? You’re all but unheard of, yet your CD is harder to get into than the Pentagon. And it’s not even compatible with the iPod! I would expect this sort of thing from Metallica or Rod Stewart, but not you. This really hurts my (one and only) feeling.

Hmmm… According to the graphics of anality, I am permitted to arrow the contents of the disc over to my Mac, so long as I am running Mac OS 8.6 or higher. Seeing as how Mac OS 8.6 came out in 1999, I’m pretty sure I meet and exceed that requirement. For you, Tristan, I’ll give it a whirl.

I slipped the CD into my MacBook and within moments it showed up in iTunes, downloaded the track names, and was imported as AAC. Awesome.

In reality, I imagine Tristan has very little (if anything) to do with the copyright protection that plagues her otherwise good album (she just has assholes for bosses and that’s not necessarily her fault, is it?). For the Windows inclined, Tristan has a forum on her official web site with a link to a thread about circumventing the copyprotection of her own CD using third-party software right on her front page.

Therefore, I hold the greedy corporate suits at Virgin Records responsible for this pointless annoyance. You and the rest of the record industry can suck it. No one is going to buy your music if they can’t even use it easily. Let this be a lesson to you, bitches. Oh, and thank you for being clueless about Macs. Without your ignorance, I might never have been able to listen to the CD that I paid for.

And a special thanks to Tristan Prettyman. I think your stuff is pretty good.

¹Sorry, Anaglyph.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Apple Mac, Bullshit, Computers, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.