Music sales down...what else do they expect..

CNN.com - Music slump: 'Worst may be over'� - Apr 7, 2004 This is linked today from Slashdot. According to the article music sales have fallen 7.6% in 2003, a record fall. I am not surprised.

The music industry is dumb. I am not the first one to say this and blog about it, but crib I shall. I completely agree with this.
I agree because:

On 29th March (yes, it was Megha's birthday gift) I bought Norah Jones's new Feels like home CD marketed in India by EMI, and yes anti copy technolgy is provided for free :) This was my first experience with anti copy technology and inspite of the bad things i had heard about it, I went ahead and bought it expecting a certain degree of inconvenience.

My expectations weren't low enough and now I feel cheated. I expected it to not play (with normal music players like winamp etc) on a computer where it can be possibly ripped. They provide a player with the CD using which you can play the CD even on a computer and so I thought it was ok. However, I expected it to play on my dvd/mp3 player and another portable sony cd player. The cover of the CD warns "Might not play in some car stereos". I thought ok..i do not have a car stereo :) ..

I come home put it in the CD players and they fail to recognize the CD :(( I put it on the computer and play it using the player on the CD. It plays music which i felt was low on quality..it seems they introduce some errors in the content which can be removed only by their player and the format in itself is some windows media player format. The whole thing just sucks big time. If this was not enough, the fucking player takes 100% CPU :((

Dumb idiots..after making me go through this if EMI expects me to buy even one more CD from them then it is just wishful thinking.

Easy CD extractor people have decoded the little secret though and offer ripping from anti copy CDs as a feature :) I used it with great pleasure.